Germany's rich are living longer, but poor die younger

By Guenther Voss Dec 14, 2011, 13:31 GMT

Berlin - Germany may have one of Europe's fastest ageing populations but newly released official figures show that the life expectancy of the country's poorest has been falling sharply.

The median age of death of Germans who had very low incomes during their working lives dropped from 77.5 in 2001 to 75.5 in 2010, the national pensions authority says.

The trend was even more marked in former communist East Germany, where the median age at death of former low-paid workers fell from 77.9 to 74.1.

The figures caused shock and surprise this week, but the pension authority has confirmed their authenticity.

It records both the lifetime incomes of wage and salary earners and the age at which their pensions cease, namely at the time of death.

By contrast, the median death age of retired workers who drew above-average incomes increased from 82.5 to 83.4 years over the same decade.

The conclusion to be drawn from the data, which was published in response to a question asked in parliament by the opposition Left Party, is that well-off people live longer and are less likely to suffer from chronic illnesses.

Poverty researcher Christoph Butterwege believes the growing gap between the life expectancies of rich and poor Germans can be easily explained by stresses suffered by workers in the low-wage sector and unsatisfactory health treatment.

Butterwege says it is understandable that the lower-paid themselves contribute to their declining health by leading unhealthier lifestyles. It is more likely that unhappy people will look to numb themselves with the help of cigarettes and alcohol.

Experts have long known that people with a lower social status are likely to have more things wrong with them healthwise.

The society of lung-care physicians believes the figures could be accurate, since a smoker cuts his or her own life expectancy by 10 years on average as a result of the health damage caused by tobacco.

Since smoking is most common among the poor, this is more than sufficient to explain the lower life expectancy figures for socially disadvantaged people.

Even though the figures appear to be accurate, the Labour Ministry called for them to be treated with caution.

'There is absolutely no reliable indicator to show that the general trend towards higher life expectancies across all income groups has been broken,' said a spokesman for Labour Minister Ursula von der Leyen.

Recent figures released by the Federal Statistical Office showing a further increase in life expectancy for today's over-65s.

The research showed that a 65-year-old man in Germany today can expect to live for another 17 years and four months, with the figure for women significantly higher at 20 years and seven months.

Current mortality data shows that every second German man reaches at least the age of 80 while every second women lives to at least 85.

The pensions authority also warned against misinterpreting its statistics, saying they were drawn from just 10,000 cases and may not reflect an overall trend in a period when 400,000 pensions were terminated by death.

In 2009, Social Democratic Party (SPD) health expert Karl Lauterbach estimated that men with a monthly salary of more than 4,500 euros (5,980 dollars) could expect to live around seven years longer than someone earning less than 1,500 euros.

Lauterbach argues that a set retirement age - it is currently gradually moving up from 65 to 67 - leads to injustice.

He says that the number of people on low incomes who die before retirement age, and receive no old-age pension at all, is twice as high as the number with above-average salaries who suffer this fate.

Lauterbach contends that the well-off win out twice: they have better working incomes and many more years of pension support later.

The pension contributions of the poor end up being used to sustain the wealthy. German pensions are pegged to individuals' lifetime incomes.

The pro-labour German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) once proposed the introduction of a new method of calculating pensions, that looked at both contributions and life expectancy, to address this inequality.

Under the proposal, people with an annual income of up to 35,000 euros would receive a higher monthly pension while higher-income earners would face a drop in pension payments of up to 500 euros a month.

That recommendation failed to gain widespread public support, probably in part because of the ramifications.

The same arguments would have also required pension reductions for women and increases for men. Germans tend to rally behind policy moves that help the poor, but not policy changes to help males.