I'm looking for the odds of dying before age 65 for an American, from
a reputable source.

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Clarification of Question by bill0917-ga on 12 Mar 2006 13:49 PST

I do not want the source to be life insurance companies or anything
related to selling something based on those odds.  (In case they
inflate that number to sell more insurance)  I want an unbiased
source, such as an actuary.

Bill,

For US statistics on life expectancy, it's hard to get more reputable
than the federal govenrment's National Center for Health Statistics:


http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/Default.htm
National Center for Health Statistics


In particular, the NCHS has published a table of life expectancies by
age and gender, which can be seen here:


http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr53/nvsr53_06.pdf
Table B. Number of survivors by age, out of 100,000 born alive, by
race and sex: United States, 2002


The table shows that, for every 100,000 people who were born 65 years
ago, 82,607 are still alive.

Put another way, the odds of still being alive at age 65 are 82.6%.

Therefore, the odds of dying before age 65 is 17.4%.


I trust that's exactly the information you needed.

But please don't rate this answer if you find you need additional
clarification.  Just let me know what it is you still need, and I'll
be happy to research the matter further for you.

Cheers,

pafalafa-ga


search strategy -- Used bookmarked links for the NCHS

Exactly what I needed.  I had this data, I just didn't think to look at it that way.

This is a bit of a problematic question - mainly as I don't know what
use the questioner intends to put the answer to.

For one thing data such as the above is years out of date - by 65
years if you apply it to a newborn today.

Another problem is that it fails to represent adults today.  Someone
35 today has a chance of reaching 65 that's higher than that of a
newborn simply because they managed to avoid dying for 35 years.   If
the rates stay constant (so you don't mind it being 30 years out of
date) that suggests a higher than 82% chance of reaching 65.   You
wouldn't conclude from this data that 17% of today's 64yo have under a
year to live.

I wonder how this statistic fits with the one (another question)
showing that 25% of women born in 1916 were still alive a couple of
years ago?

You make a good point, Bozo99-ga.  How do you propose one fits these
statistics more to themselves personally?  For example, I'm a 23 year
old white male.  How would I interpret these stats?