As Americans are dying younger, corporations are saving billions
Steady improvements in American life expectancy have stalled, and more Americans are dying at younger ages. But for companies straining under the burden of their pension obligations, the distressing trend could have a grim upside: If people don’t end up living as long as they were projected to just a few years ago, their employers ultimately won’t have to pay them as much in pension and other lifelong retirement benefits.
In 2015, the American death rate — the age-adjusted share of Americans dying — rose slightly for the first time since 1999. And over the last two years, at least 12 large companies, from Verizon to General Motors, have said recent slips in mortality improvement have led them to reduce their estimates for how much they could owe retirees by upward of a combined $9.7 billion, according to a Bloomberg analysis of company filings.
“Revised assumptions indicating a shortened longevity,” for instance, led Lockheed Martin to adjust its estimated retirement obligations downward by a total of about $1.6 billion for 2015 and 2016, it said in its most recent annual report.
Mortality trends are only a small piece of the calculation companies make when estimating what they’ll owe retirees, and indeed, other factors actually led Lockheed’s pension obligations to rise last year.
Variables such as asset returns, salary levels and health care costs can cause swings in what companies expect to pay retirees. The fact that people are dying slightly younger won’t cure corporate America’s pension woes — but the fact that companies are taking it into account shows just how serious the shift in America’s mortality trends is.
It’s not just corporate pensions, either; the shift also affects Social Security. The most recent data available “show continued mortality reductions that are generally smaller than those projected,” according to a July report from the program’s chief actuary. Longevity gains fell short of what was projected in last year’s report, leading to a slight improvement in the program’s outlook.
“Historically, mortality rates annually have tended to come down year-overyear,” says R. Dale Hall, managing director of research at the Society of Actuaries. The professional association compiles mortality data that many private pension plans use in their projections.
“There really has been a little bit of slowdown in mortality improvement in the United States,” he says.
Absent a war or an epidemic, it’s unusual and alarming for life expectancies in developed countries to stop improving, let alone to worsen.
“Mortality is sort of the tip of the iceberg,” says Laudan Aron, a demographer and senior fellow at the Urban Institute. “It really is a reflection of a lot of underlying conditions of life.”
The falling trajectory of American life expectancies, especially when compared to those in some other wealthy countries, should be “as urgent a national issue as any other that’s on our national agenda,” she says.
Actuaries use two main factors to project death rates into the future: They start with current mortality levels — the percentages of people who die at a given age — and then make predictions about how those percentages might change with developments such as new medical treatments or changes to smoking or obesity rates.
Updates in the last two years, based on more recent mortality data, have pulled down companies’ estimates of what they’ll owe future retirees. The 2016 update would lower pension obligations by about 1.5 percent to 2 percent, all else being equal, according to the Society of Actuaries.