Given that most people think that it is better to be alive than dead, one might expect that the increased longevity of the population would have been greeted with universal joy.

Here are a few of the extraordinary facts. Life expectancy at birth increased by almost a decade in the first 50 years of the NHS. And, whereas in 1948, 40 per cent of people died before reaching pensionable age, this was reduced to 7 per cent by 1996.

Recent trends in the life expectancy are even more astonishing: for example, between 1980 and 2000, three years was added to the life expectancy of a 60-year-old male. Data from the Continuous Mortality Investigation, maintained by the actuarial profession, shows that, while a 65-year-old male might, in 1997, have expected to die at 83, the figure for 2005 is over 86 and the projected figure for 2015 is nearly 90.

Yet the “ageing population” is seen as a big problem. It is assumed that more old people having a longer old age equals more people in expensive misery, needing ever more medical care. Why is there such a “miserabilist” response to the increases we’ve seen in life expectancy in rich countries? The evidence is that the levels of ill-health and disability in older people at any given age are falling — a tribute to the effectiveness of health promotion, preventive medicine and acute medical care. Old people are living not only longer but also in better nick.

The key to this trend is the postponement of chronic, disabling illness such as strokes to the point where there is a high probability of dying (relatively easily) from the painless and diffuse processes associated with intrinsic ageing. People are falling seriously ill at ever later ages. In 20 years in geriatric medicine, I have seen the age of my typical patient increase by a decade or more. We are, as the gerontologist John Grimley Evans has said, spending a “longer time living and a shorter time dying”. It is no surprise, therefore, that the per capita expenditure on health and social care on people over 85 fell between the middle 1980s and the middle 1990s.

The doomsters, however, say that even if we can afford to keep older people healthy, how can we afford older people? This question makes sense only if we assume that older people are consumers of public resources rather than contributors to the national wealth. That assumption, if it ever was valid, is certainly not valid for a healthy elderly population. We could make huge strides towards solving the pensions crisis by relating the age of retirement to the median age of death (which is now about 79). Some experts suggest retiring eight years before that median age. If this means that we have to work longer, so be it. After all, you get weekends and evenings off at work. Death offers no such perks.

Raymond Tallis teaches geriatric medicine at the University of Manchester