How much have the gov saved though on say 30k pensioners?
At least 8k per year. Some will have 10yre left. 2bn?
FT estimates 50k plus have died. Full state pension is £8,750 a yr. my mum gets less though presumably as she didn't have enough NI contributions. Yrs left is hard to predict but even 50k x £7k p.a. for 5 yrs is £1.75bn.
Then there is also their cost to the NHS via saved medicines, regular GP and hospital appts for monitoring existing health issues, diagnosing new ones, treatments and surgeries needed. An average of £1k p a for those 5 yrs is £0,25bn.
Plus the social care costs - who knows how many of those pensioners are not self funding their care home costs. Plus the ones currently living independently may have careers now or would need them or residential care in the future. There's a Full Fact page which says in 2018/19 councils budgeted to spend £16bn on adult social care. There are around 12m people aged 65+ and 3.2m aged 80+. If we assume the two thirds of the money is spent on those 80+ then that's £10.7bn on 3.2m or £3,344 each per annum (which seems low but I guess there are those living independently or self funding their care in the over 80's group). So if 50k die who would otherwise have lived 5 yrs that's £0.8bn saved.
Which makes a total of £2.8bn saved to date. The above estimates are that a pensioner costs an average of £11.3k p.a.
Please do check my maths and challenge my assumptions. I haven't really researched things like the NHS costs but I have helped my parents and an aunt get to an average age of 85 with associated health issues so have a little insight into their many appointments and medicines. My mum has hospital appointments every 6wks for an eye condition and often needs another appt for treatment and my dad got a dual chamber pacemaker fitted a couple of years ago which with all the diagnostic appts, the surgery, the follow up appointments including daily outpatient diuretics drips to relieve his heart failure symptoms must have cost £10k plus in a year.