via Wall Street Journal
My wife and I are trying to set up a budget for retirement, and we’re wrestling, in particular, with health-care expenses. How can we estimate what our medical bills will look like in the future?
An important—and vexing—question. For instance, a healthy person will have fewer and/or smaller medical bills in later life, right? Well…maybe not. As a recent study, “An Apple a Day: The Impact of Health Conditions on the Required Savings” noted, “Excellent health, ironically, can actually raise an individual’s lifetime health spending needs because of the likelihood that healthy 65-year-olds will live much longer.”
A good starting point (and a study worth reading in full) is the “2015 Retirement Health Care Costs Data Report” from HealthView Services Inc., a provider of health-care planning tools in Danvers, Mass. According to HealthView, a healthy 65-year-old couple can expect to pay, on average, $266,589 for insurance premiums and $128,365 for related expenses (dental, vision, copays and out-of-pocket bills) over their lifetime.
Another good resource—one with an emphasis on prescription-drug costs—is “Amount of Savings Needed for Health Expenses for People Eligible for Medicare” from the Employee Benefit Research Institute in Washington. The study estimates that a couple, where both spouses have median drug expenses, would need $259,000 to have a 90% chance of having enough money to cover health-care bills in retirement.
