 On to our final panel, can we live long and prosper, which is going to explore the potential response of public and private institutions to increasing human longevity and health. And our moderator is Will Salatan. Will, one of my oldest colleagues in journalism, we've worked together for 28 years. Where's Will? There you are, there you are, with one gap of a few years in between. Will is the other person you have to read in Slade if you want to sound smart. And Will is the national correspondent at Slade Covering Science, Technology, Politics, and Society. Thank you, Jacob. And I also want to say thank you to Bob and Kevin. That was awesome. That was like car talk about your body. I thought that way. I would love to hear just like an hour's long show every week about what you should actually be spending your money on in terms of your payoff. I don't know about the rest of you, but I came here hoping to find out some secrets of longevity. And I heard a lot of talk up here. But talk is cheap. The actual behavior is I've been watching the people from Prudential. They're eating the fruit. It's not complicated. You muffin people, you know who you are. We are kind of the dogs at the dinner table group. We get what's left. Our mandate is we're going to talk to you a little bit about and talk with each other about public and private institutions and how they should respond to some of the trends that we've talked about at the personal level. So we have a terrific group here to talk about this. At the far end is Gary Koenig. He is director of economic security at AARP's Public Policy Institute, which analyzes and develops policies related to financial security of the population aged 50 and older. He used to be his work focuses on social security, retirement savings, retirement accounts, and tax policy. And he used to be an economist for the joint committee on taxation in the US Congress, where he specialized in employer-provided pensions and retirement plans. I was talking with Gary last night. He actually was there during the shutdown of 95 and 96, but he swears he had nothing to do with it. Next to him is Wilhelmina Lay. She is senior research associate at the Economic Security Civic Engagement and Governance Institute, part of the joint center for political and economic studies. She has taught at Harvard, Howard, and Georgetown. She has done work throughout her career in the areas of health policy, housing policy, income security, and asset building, and labor market issues. She's also an elected member of the National Academy of Social Insurance. And she used to be a principal analyst at the US Congressional Budget Office, but again, as far as we know, had nothing to do with certain events years ago. Or certainly the ones now, speaking of which, sorry, let me get to Michael Burt next to me. He is director of the Center for Sustainable Health at Arizona State University. Prior to that, he was senior vice president at the National Bureau of Asian Research and the founding director of the Bureau's Center for Health and Aging. He was also the founding executive director of the Pacific Health Summit, which welcomes 250 top leaders from science, industry, and policy to discuss how to realize the dream of a healthier future through the effective use of scientific advances and industrial innovation. We had a fourth panelist, we're really bummed he couldn't be here, Steven Goss, the chief actuary at the Social Security Administration. And Steve is a shutdown casualty, they told him that he can only do getting out the checks, that being here with us today was not essential. We called them and tried to explain to the social security people that we were here to talk about raising the, we sort of mumbled the death ceiling. But apparently the hearing of older people is better than it used to be and they sort of snuffed us out and so Steve could not be here today. We will try to cover for him as best we can. I'm gonna sit down in just a second here. So I'm gonna basically throw it open to the group here. We've heard a lot of topics during the course of the day and I'll just mention a couple of things and I'm gonna let you guys go at whatever interests you in this group. We've been talking about the general phenomenon of longer retirement and how to deal with that. We've talked, there are the two scenarios that people have been debating here, the drooling on your shoes versus living long and prosper. Are there health policy changes that we should consider with regard to trying to avoid the drooling scenario and get the prosper scenario? The gaps between blue and white collar employees and their perspective retirements. The gender gaps, the phenomenon of widows, the phenomenon of greater likelihood of divorce potentially with longer life. Consumer culture versus savings culture. Do we need to change the culture in this country? Are there policy ways to do that? And I guess I'll invite Michael to start us off because we've been talking a lot about this country but we really haven't talked that much about the global perspective, what we can learn from other countries, what are the global trends, what are the comparisons. Michael is the author of a terrific piece that's in slate right now in which he talks about the changing demographics of greater population proportion at the higher level, at the higher ages and less at the lower levels and some of the implications of that. But he also has tremendous experience globally. So Michael, I'd like you to start us off, talk about the global context. Okay, great, thank you, Will. Well, let me start with asking the audience two questions to get a feel for the audience. One, how many of you like roller coasters? Not many, okay? A few, a few more hands are going up. How many of you have been to Tokyo? Oh, quite a few, good. Beijing, Taipei, Seoul, so to Asia, maybe the whole. So much of the room has been to Asia. Well, let me try and connect those two questions. So imagine the roller coaster, I love roller coasters. So that moment you're moving up. So imagine those cars as you're going up that the leaders of each of those countries is in a car. At the front of that line is Japan and then it's Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and at the back, that's five car train is China. And you know that moment when you're at a roller coaster and it's just, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay and you get to the top and then it's that kind of OMG moment when you realize there's really no way off this roller coaster and you're on it until it stops. I mean, that's just, and that moment, that OMG moment or OMFG moment, whatever you wanna call it, that is where Japan is right now in terms of longevity in Asia. And this is going to have a profound impact on us and we're seeing it play out in something called abeanomics. I don't know if our economists are still with us, but Japan is literally rolling the dice on its future as an economy, as in a society, as a culture that it can handle the issues around longevity in a way that will be positive but if they get it wrong, they are literally at the moment when all of us will pay the price for that. So if you don't know this, you should study it a bit but Japan's debt burden compared to the United States, Japan is 240% of its GDP as government debt and Japan is in absolute population freefall. It has lost two million people from its population and those numbers accelerate dramatically. It looks like a roller coaster. 40% of Japan's population will be over the age of 65 and 2050 and even more remarkably, Japan's population over the age of 75 will be at around 25% soon. And Japan's birth rate is actually a fairly high 1.2 or so but if you start looking at those other cars behind Japan, Taiwan, the birth rate is now less than one. Replacement is 2.2, birth rate in Shanghai now is 0.68. So these societies in Korea is about 1.2. So these societies are accelerating. It's going to do this and it's going to have an impact on us. So I first went to Asia in 1975 and when I went in 1975, Chairman Mao was still alive. Singapore was just eight years away from riots in the streets that threatened its very existence. Korea was just 20 years away, 1975, 20 years away from being the world's poorest country. Can you imagine? And Japan was just really beginning its economic growth but what has happened in Asia for those you've been there is it's literally real time compression of all these issues we're talking about that are happening there and actually well beyond what we're experiencing now. And what they don't have that we have, we think of it as a problem, right? Immigration, the immigration problem in the United States. This is not a solution that's available to any of these countries. So what we're facing or what they're facing is an absolute decline in population long-term. Japan's already experiencing this. Rapidly aging populations. And for the economists in the room, productivity is a factor of how many people work how hard and that's your GDP. So how do you sustain that kind of economic growth, that kind of future when you have an absolutely declining population and what Japan is committed to do. So that downward momentum is it has an explicit policy to print as much money as it will take in order to create 2% inflation a year. That is its policy. And so if it gets that wrong, if it defaults on its government bonds, if it can't grow fast enough to pay those debts, the impact on the global economy is going to be profound. And to show you just at the back of the train how much has changed. So if you've looked in your clothing labels recently, you've probably started noticing it's not made in China. It's made in Indonesia. It's made in Vietnam. And why is that? Because something I could have never imagined in Asia when I went in 1975 is that there's a shortage of labor in China. A shortage of low-paid labor. Labor prices are going up. So low-cost producers are moving elsewhere in order to have those products made. So Indonesia, Vietnam, Southeast Asia. So the impact of aging while its longevity has its individual impact, the way this is going to play out at a global level is already hitting us here. And it's real time. And we're not sure what it's going to be, but it's not just US policymakers deciding what happens in the US. It's going to be how US policymakers respond to what's happening in aging populations around the world. Thank you, Michael. Gary, we've been talking today, a lot of folks have been talking about retirement savings and social security and at some of it at a personal level or at a corporate level. What should we do at a policy level? What reflections do you have on what you've heard and what we should be doing? Well, one thing I just want to touch on what Michael said. And we're talking about longevity, but part of the aging of society has to do with this drop in fertility. And so I heard the solution earlier today, and that was baby factories. So I don't know how we do it, but I think it's worth exploring. We heard earlier in the panel before us in terms of we know that people are going to need to save more. Whatever the scenario ends up being, we know that people are going to save more. Longer working lives are also going to have to be part of the solution. In terms of savings, we're seeing some things that we know are working. So for example, one thing is automating the system. So instead of having people elect into a four-income K plan to have them automatically enroll, then we see they don't really opt out very much. There's ways to perfect that, because right now the way it typically works is you're auto-enrolling them at 3% of their pay, which we know is not enough. But you can do things like auto escalation. So I think that's where we're seeing a lot of promise. We need more companies are doing it. We need even more companies to do it. But at a baseline, we just need more companies to offer a plan to save, because that's the easiest way for people to save. That's the most efficient way for them to save is through their employer, through payroll deduction. And so we need to get this 50% that was mentioned earlier up either through carats, sticks. We don't like to talk about a mandate, but maybe we have to go there to get more people saving more money. A mandate, that should be interesting. You might get a couple of shutdowns over that. Thank you, Mark. Well, Amina, we've been talking today a lot about the existing gaps in, I've heard the numbers 30 years, 50 years thrown around in terms of longevity. Are those trends increasing? Is there the prospect of them growing? Is there a prospect of contracting them? What should we be doing in terms of all of our policies, whether it has to do with health research or asset building or any or incentives provided by the government to deal with that problem? Thank you, and that's a very loaded question, but I've been listening all morning and have plenty of food for thought to bear on that. If you look at the gaps that exist in, if you look at the gaps that existed in life expectancy between blacks and whites in 2010, and if you looked at causes of death and which causes of death were the major factors in causing those gaps in life expectancy, you come up with the usual suspects, some of which the previous panelists talked about in terms of the value of research and the value of life. You come up with things like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, homicide, and believe it or not, perinatal disorders. Those are what you come up with as the cause of death factors that have bearing on the difference in the life expectancy. A study was done by NCHS that looked at this. Now, I'm not gonna stop there. I'm gonna say, okay, these are the major causes of death of everybody. Most people die from heart disease or cancer. They're the number two, number one, number two killers. So if these are the major factors that contribute to the gap in life expectancy between blacks and whites, and these were the only two groups that were measured, by the way, in 2010, then something else is going on there too, because everybody dies of the causes that I named except for homicide. But there's something else going on there. And I would throw that out and ask us to think about this in terms of how do we deal with closing that gap so that perhaps all of us can live longer, live long and prosper. The World Health Organization had a commission on the social determinants of health in 2008, and I'm gonna quote from them because they say it better than I did. The circumstances in which people grow, live, work and age, and the systems put in place to deal with illness, in other words, the conditions in which people live and die are shaped by political, social and economic forces. And if you look at the context of the USA, there are, as people have been saying throughout this session, there are places where there are huge gaps in life expectancy very near to each other. For instance, the city of Baltimore, the lowest, the poorest census tracts have about a 25% shorter life expectancy than the wealthiest census tracts. So place matters, the social determinants of health matter. The gentleman in the previous session made a point about education. So stop and think about census tracts in which the schools are not adequate. There, these census tracts are food deserts, so even if you want to eat right, you can't very easily. There's no transportation system public that can get you where you need to go, either to jobs or buying better food. And it's not necessarily safe because if people don't have jobs, they become more like predators than human beings and they do things that they feel they have to do, but that's part of the reason why homicide is such a big factor in the difference between life expectancies. So my point here is, if we want to think about moving forward to that option C, live long and prosper for everybody, then we have to think about focusing on what are the social determinants of health and doing something to close those gaps that make areas like those census tracts that I mentioned or even places in Appalachia which are not healthy and people have shorter life expectancies than other parts of the world or people on American Indian reservations who have shorter life expectancies than others. So short answer, going into the future, I think we still have gaps. I think what we can do about it though is focusing on some of the broader social, economic, demographic, place-based types of issues and addressing those. Thank you. So we have several different frameworks we can talk about here. I'd like to start by with a very concrete question which is when we look at these numbers of increased longevity and increased health spans, right, I believe the retirement age in this country has moved from 65 to 66 on its way to 67, is that right? Is that anywhere near where it should be? And if it's not, what do we need to do to change either retirement age for social security or some other policies around that program or programs such as Medicare? So social security age was 65, the full retirement age was 65, it's now 66, it's going up to those born in 1960 and after. And this was begun in a policy change that happened in 1983. And at the time it was to address the shortfall that we had at that time. I think we're still seeing what's the ramifications of that. I mean, one thing Wilhelmina mentioned is that if we are seeing this increase in life expectancy that's different for different socioeconomic classes, I think there's a question here, what's the right policy? One policy may not be the right policy for everyone. We hired earlier that there's, and I mentioned this earlier, obviously working longer is gonna have to be part of the solutions, part of the solutions for people's individual security, but it's also for our society as well in terms of the stress that are on some of these programs. But the fact is that, and we had this question earlier, some people may not be able to work longer for health reasons, for job reasons. What we're seeing now in this economy is that if you're over 55 and you lose your job, you're out of work seeking employment for about a year. And those are folks who are still looking for a job. So we know that if you lose your job later in life, you're gonna have a tough time getting back, getting, finding a job and making up for those lost years. So I think there's a lot of things that need to go on into that consideration of what we do in terms of how do we address these programs to make them sustainable. Michael, are there things we can learn from the way other countries have dealt with these policies? Well, I think so, but I'd also like to make a comment about using age grading as we get older, that we live in a very age graded society. You know, we all enter elementary school at the same time. We get a driver's license at the same time. The drinking age is the same age. And we've had this 65-year-old retirement age as a, and as you point out though, the healthy, health-adjusted life expectancy in the United States has gone up. It's 68 years old now, I think, is that average age when we first have our, have our first chronic disease. By the way, we're falling behind the rest of the world, though, in that process. We're actually lower in the international rankings than we were 10 years ago. So we've improved our health life expectancy, but we're not doing as well as other countries in that respect. But I think the biggest challenge for society in dealing with this issue is not to use a one-size-fits-all approach to what longevity looks like. Because as we get older, the very human variability accelerates. People at 65 are dead. You know, I have friends who didn't make it to 65. And so to try to create that one-size-fits-all retirement age simply doesn't take into account that phenotype, genotype are life experiences by their very definition create individual variability. And so what society needs to be creating, and maybe the prudential folks and others, this is really the value of this, is to provide different responses so that people can live different kinds of life as they age rather than trying to find an action. And I'd love to have had our Social Security Actuarial person here. But just, really, how do we increase choice rather than decrease it, I guess, as would. Now, I have to say this. We're here, so part of our mandate is to talk about policy. And when you say we don't need one size, I always hear politicians stand up and say, we don't need a one-size-fits-all. But if you're making policy, it's kind of your job. So we have a couple of folks here who have done policy. I mean, first of all, I've already told the panelists the TV rule, if you don't like my question, just answer the one you wished I'd asked you instead. So I'm going to throw it, I'll just say, how do we deal with the problem of one-size-fits-all? We have to make policies about retirement and about health care spending. Given what everyone has observed, which is the enormous increase of variation, as Michael points out, what do we do about that? You know, I think one of the things that would help is if we could consider being much more flexible in the workplace. And when I say flexible, I mean, when someone gets to the age of 65 and they really can't get up and get to work every day and they really can't do a full day's work five days a week, they should have the option to work four days a week or three days a week. And there are ways to pro-rate whatever benefits they get to go along with that. But seldom does that happen. There are a few employers that offer that kind of option. So in terms of policy making, you could pass a law that says the workplace flexibility can be established. It can include things like this without a hard mandate. But I think setting those hard and fast age limits, I mean, I understand it for budgeting purposes, for programs, but setting them for the point of view of telling an employee that he or she has to stop working when they may feel perfectly capable of continuing to work, but perhaps for three days a week instead of five days a week and making the workplace match. Well, I mean, when you're talking about this, how much of this is economics, how much of it is culture? Do we need to change workplace culture? Is there some way that politicians, you say perhaps not a mandate, how would a policy maker go about getting employers to think differently about people at age 55, say? Well, I don't know how you could get them to think differently about people at age 55, but I do think that it's sort of like the law that was passed that transformed the signing up for the 401k for a 3B from a opt-in to an opt-out. And as I understand it, the way that law was framed, it gave employers the option of establishing the opt-in as opposed to, I mean, the opting out for the sign up. It wasn't a mandate, but a law was passed that said yes, and employer could change their program so that employees would have to opt out. And that has made a world of difference, and you found lots of employers have just gone all the way with that. So that's the way I think you could frame something. So in thinking about this, I think with increasing longevity, people are at risk of outliving the resources. It's a lot more uncertainty. I think there's uncertainty now, but I think there's gonna be even more uncertainty. And I think planning for retirement, simple question of how much should you say for a secure retirement is actually a very complicated question. And it's complicated because you don't know first tell me how long you're gonna live, and then I can back in and tell you how much you need to save, and tell me what you think, what you're gonna get in your return. So I think there is a potential role here for policy, and it could be private, it could be public solutions for more insurance to take care of that tail risk. So the longevity risk, if you can do something and it may be in social security, it may be in something else where when people reach a certain age, their actual social security benefit actually goes up higher than inflation, that in some ways taking care of that tail risk of increasing excess of longevity. And it makes the problem of solving how much I need to live to, let's say 80, a little bit simpler to solve. Interesting, okay, I wanna throw it open. Michael, do you wanna throw? Well, there's one more question that I'm dying to throw out to the panel, and I don't know if anyone here feels comfortable addressing it, and if you don't want to, you don't have to, but when I look at the scenarios that Joel presented at the beginning, when I think about the drooling on your shoes versus the live long and prosper, I wonder, and I've seen lots of politicians stand up over the last 48 hours and talk about NIH, funding, research at NIH, it's all very important. I wonder whether there are smarter ways of allocating the money we spend on medical research. Are we spending too much on the kinds of research that lead us to the drooling scenario and not enough on the kind that leads us to the prosperity scenario, or to put it in computer terms, are we spending too much on the hardware and not enough on the software? Michael, did you wanna? Sure, well, this is a problem I face daily. I used to be the interim director of the Biodesign Institute, and the U.S. has this magnificent engine for what's called discovery research. That's what the NIH funds. So we have great scientists, we develop world-feeding technologies at the discovery level, but what all societies in the U.S. is not an exception to this, is we lack the ability to translate that discovery research into the kinds of daily applications that really make a difference in people's lives. So the statistic that's used is it takes 17 years, this is an Institute of Medicine statistic, to take a discovery research finding and translate that into practice. So think of that, even if there's an invention or a drug for Alzheimer's that's invented that's already there right now, it's 20 years before it actually gets applied. So the lag time in this translation engine as all this accelerates is a huge problem that we are not facing and are less likely to face now because of sequestration, shutdowns, and death-sealing issues. Great. So as you guys can see, these folks know everything, so ask them any question you'd like to ask. Can we get the microphone to, believe we have a question back here to start with? Hi, Alan Abel again. Can we get back on the roller coaster and let me propose a scenario E? From a Malthusian point of view, immortality is unsustainable. People keep having children, you can't have an infinite number of people alive. From a policy point of view, could there ever come a time when governments would have to say there's a top cutoff to how long you're gonna get Social Security, we'll pay it till you're 125, or not necessarily put the grandparents on the ice flow and push them off, but is there an upper limit to what society can do? Not euthanasia, but saying benefits policy when you're 160, you're on your own. Can you ever see that happening? I don't see that happening. I don't see how that happens. I mean, whether someone's 100, 150, there's someone's parent, grandparent, and I can't see that happening. And we know right now that as people age, they're more likely to be in poverty. And John rather mentioned earlier, a lot of these folks are widows, and I can't see us getting to point where we say, okay, enough is enough, you've had your fun, and that's it. So no, I don't see us going there. Next question. Go ahead, wait, wait, microphone coming. It seems to me that an area of social research that's been neglected, and that is how to get people to defer gratification. Because what I understand is about half the population is capable of deferred gratification and half is not. And so when we make social security available to people at 62, we shouldn't be surprised that the majority of people actually take it then, even if it's not in their long-term best interest. So I don't know that medical research is the research that we most need if we're really going to improve quality of life in healthy years. Maybe we need more money into education throughout the lifespan, and maybe that would have a bigger impact than curing cancer, which we all want, but which would only add a very tiny increment to longevity. Well, I heard from both Wilhelmina and Gary, I think about, I heard opt-in, opt-out, which sounded like a little bit of a nudge policy that wasn't education, wasn't a mandate. Would something like that be able to deal with the problem of deferred gratification? Do we need broader policy changes? Well, one of the parts of the social determinants of health is educating people. And clearly if we put our money into looking at those causes of the life expectancy gap, then yes. I mean, it's education to make people understand why they should make choices of a certain type or why making the choice to get your money at 62 might not be in your best interest. And that comes along with, it can, and it should come along with educational programs that are better overall. Gary, can we tinker with the incentives? Well, I'm not optimistic about us educating people to delay taking social security benefits. I mean, we've tried, and I think we could probably do more, but I think there's just a temptation there to grab it while they can. And I think when you have conversations, going on about social security's gonna be cut, it's not gonna be there, that doesn't really gender a lot of confidence in the program. And so may give people to claim earlier. I think there are things that we probably can do that we can borrow from behavioral economics to change it from an opt-out, from an opt-in to an opt-out, or something along those lines, maybe even reframing what we call the early eligibility age. I don't know, but it is an issue that I think we do need to get people to wait as long as they can to claim social security benefits, because it is a good deal to wait. And particularly in a low-interest environment, we have John Chauvin who's mentioned this. It's even a better deal right now to wait. We're just not seeing a lot of people waiting now. In answer to your question, John, actually it's an area of huge interest in investment and behavioral change now. And so we're seeing an ASU is right in the thick of this. So devices like Fitbits and Jawbone Ups, which is this integration of physiological and behavioral metrics that will be around behavior change in order to intervene earlier so that it's not a cure for cancer, it's a delay of cancer. So delay of disability is the real game we're in. We're not gonna cure these diseases. You die of something in the end. So how long can you delay disability is what an actuarial will point out are the real cost savings. And behavior is part of all of those diseases. Yeah, the biggest part, absolutely. So that's the exciting area of research, I think. And it's really fun to see what's happening right now. I think we have one over here. Thank you so much. It's been wonderful. Regarding policy issues, a lot of unhealthy food, I understand is subsidized in our country and looking at the disparity issue where the poor and minorities don't have access to healthy food. What are your thoughts on policy changes to actually bring what we know is healthy to the citizens that need it the most in addition to education, medical care and things of that nature? Thank you. One of the things that's been experimented with and it's been experimented in places like Detroit, Michigan, where there's... I'm from Detroit, too. Oh, really? Okay, where there's lots of land. Houses have been torn down. There are not that many people living in some of the areas. Is to develop urban farms. I'm not using, there is a program and I don't know if they're called urban farms but to encourage people who are living there to grow their own foods. Their programs to also get schools started growing, kids growing food because once people see this and once they taste the real difference in the quality of food that's been grown in your backyard without a lot of pesticides and transported hundreds of miles, once people taste the food and once you make it more readily accessible people will buy into it. One of the other things is co-ops. Farmers markets, people who come from nearby farming areas into urban areas, food deserts and actually one of the policy measures that I am aware of that I think has a good thing is that what used to be called food stamps is now SNAP but many farmers markets accept those now. And that's a step up, you know because it allows people who may not have enough money to buy, to go to Whole Foods and buy whatever. It gives them an option that they can exercise. One comment I just wanna add to that it sure sounds to me from what I heard today both the convergence of lifespan or the diminishing gap between socioeconomic groups and also the increase from 1900 to 2000 and how much of it occurred at the level of infant mortality in early age that the biggest bang for the buck efficiency wise is actually to target the populations with the lowest lifespans and that that will, I mean on a sheer utility basis would produce the biggest gains for the money, is that fair? I would say targeting the areas where they live. Again, the whole place matters approach. Targeting their areas and bringing in resources that people don't have on their own to help them make choices. Like one of the previous speakers indicated that he was coming to Washington and he wanted to see this hip specialist and he called them up two weeks in advance and I thought to myself, how many other people do I know who would think to do that number one and then be able to get to see the hip specialist? Normally getting medical care and things of that sort you have to get in a line. It doesn't come that quickly and easily. So I mean there are things that can be done to help give people resources to empower them to think about things they can do to improve their health and thereby lessen that life expectancy gap. We have a question right here at the front table here. John Turner, Pension Policy Center. An idea that Gary mentioned and is also mentioned by Lisa Mensa in the earlier session was something that's sometimes called bump up benefits and where technically it's called longevity insurance. That's the benefit that will start at an advanced stage like 82 and it's considered desirable because it provides tail risk. If you live a long time, this benefit kicks in at that point so it's really an insurance benefit. I think it's a great idea myself. That's so true. I was talking to Jamie offline. I tried to ask it a question but it wasn't enough time and I asked him why Prudential did not offer this type of benefit and he said they thought about offering the bump up benefit or longevity insurance benefit but they just did not perceive a demand for it which I mean economists that mean that at the price they had to charge there wouldn't be enough people that would take it at that price. So I just wondered if maybe there could be some discussion about this type of benefit and why it would be desirable or not and who should offer it. Would anyone like to feel that? Well John knows that annuities are not very popular. I think people are hesitant to give up some of the money in order to get a small stream of payment for the rest of their life and it's not surprising to me that people are not demanding this. I mean it's hard to think. I find it hard to think about what things might be like when I'm 82 and what my needs might be so I'm not surprised that there's not demand for that but I mean this may be a case where there's a need for government to step in and to fill that gap because I think there is a need even though if people don't recognize that there's a need I think there is this tail risk that is a problem for people when they're planning for retirement. Well just the variability again so your suggestion as a bump up demand in the back of the room was essentially talking about a bump down strategy which also would kick into something. There were a couple more of you who had hands up were out of time so you feel free to come up afterward and ask any questions and I'm sure these folks will be happy to. Is there anything else you guys wanted to add before we conclude? Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you, if you want to speak up. Thanks to this panel.