said by maartena:70 is the new 50! People that have retired in the last 15 year or so, are more modern, more active, more healthy, and thus live longer..... yeah, if you promised them a pension based in 1980s figures when half the population smoked, you are in for a surprise...
...the babyboomers are retiring! And they are going to retire (on average) a lot longer then your grandpa.
No one is necessarily "more healthy", whatever that means.
Rather, modern medical technology is able to save many who otherwise didn't make it before, whether they're "victims of gun violence" in Chicago's south side getting patched up by Gulf-war-vet trauma-care surgeons, or folks getting screened early and treated for now-survivable cancers, guys who like to wear dresses now surviving HIV infections, obese diabetics virtually curing their condition via gastric bypass, or the massive use of statins to postpone the mostly predictable consequence of high cholesterol.
There was a time we didn't have paramedics. You "called for an ambulance", but you might as well have phoned the mortuary.
Heart attack? Stroke? Today, that "AED" on the wall in the hands of civilians, improves your odds of survival by 40% over the "4 minute" fire department response.
The "surprise" is going to be born by the pensioners, who are going to get a huge haircut, either within their existing pension or its transfer to the PBGA. No amount of fussing and fuming is going to change that outcome.
The problem isn't so much that the actuaries were wrong, along with the fund managers and everyone else projecting 8% compound returns forever (some of us dissented, but we were dismissed).
The problem is that workers put their faith in their union reps, who "fought the good fight", and promised them the moon; management did their best to hold them off, but eventually was forced to coalesce - and they were happy to commit funding from revenues 30 years down the road, when both sides of the bargaining table would be long gone.