"It's nonsense to forecast life expectancy."
These were the blunt words echoed to several hundred in the audience at last month's LIMRA Life Insurance Conference in Las Vegas. They were spoken by someone who is so well respected in the field of aging and death that I personally viewed him as one of the finest keynotes ever to speak at a LIMRA event.
Dr. Jay Olshanksy, Ph.D., a professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago and research associate at The Center on Aging at the University of Chicago, has contributed to numerous articles and primetime news interviews on the subject of aging, mortality and longevity. Essentially, he works to prove how mortal the human species is (cue the depressing sigh), contrary to recent research proving an increase in the life expectancy of Americans.
Olshansky proclaimed that age-adjusted death rates for the first nine months of 2015 increased significantly compared with the same period in 2014, which clearly came as a shock to most in the crowd.
"This is a glimpse into the future," he said. "We're not going to see any type of increase in longevity any time soon. We've pushed ourselves to the age limit."
