Updated June 2025

In January 2021, a committee of the House of Lords published a report about the state of healthy aging in the United Kingdom. Notwithstanding the report’s focus on the UK, an editorial in Great Britain’s leading medical journal, The Lancet, notes that the impediments to health aging identified in the report pose universal challenges.

The UK government issued a policy paper in 2017 that addressed key challenges that the government needed to confront. The paper addressed “global trends which will transform our future” and included lofty promises to bring various organizations and businesses together to “make a real difference to people’s lives.” The policy paper was withdrawn in 2023 to reflect the different priorities of a new government.

The paper identified the “aging society” as one of the great challenges that the UK faces. The paper promised to “harness the power of innovation to help meet the needs of an aging society.” It recognized “an obligation to help our older citizens lead independent, fulfilled lives, continuing to contribute to society.”

Confronting the Challenge of an Aging Society

To confront the challenge, the UK government purported to commit itself to a difficult mission: “Ensure that people can enjoy at least 5 extra healthy, independent years of life by 2035, while narrowing the gap between the experience of the richest and poorest.” The mission would succeed if “people remain independent for longer, continue to participate through work and within their communities, and stay connected to others to counter the epidemic of loneliness.”

Those are important goals. Unfortunately, the House of Lords’ committee report suggests that little concrete progress is being made in the UK or elsewhere in the world to advance that mission.

The report found that “improving healthy life expectancy is a vital and worthy ambition,” but lamented the “minimal progress” that the UK government has made in achieving that goal. The report noted that the British are living a bit longer but are spending those extra years in poor health.

Healthy Aging During a Pandemic

Because of the pandemic, life expectancy in the United States declined between 2019 and 2021. Due largely to the half million deaths caused by COVID-19, life expectancy at birth declined by 1.13 years to 77.48 years of age. Life expectancy for someone who had reached the age of 65 declined by .87 years, from 19.4 more years of life to 18.5 more years.

Life expectancy began to rebound in 2022 and continued to increase in 2023. The end of the pandemic and declining deaths from drug overdoses drove the improvement. The CDC estimates the life expectancy of a person born in 2023 will be 78.4 years, almost as long as the projected life expectancy immediately before the pandemic.

While the pandemic was a barrier to healthy aging, widespread vaccination in the US saved thousands of lives and averted tens of thousands of hospitalizations, primarily of people who are 65 or older. Unfortunately, a different barrier impeded the vaccination of seniors. The Lancet editorial identified a problem that SeniorCareAdvice discussed: the difficulty that some seniors experienced in navigating technology to sign up for vaccinations.

While technological barriers to vaccinations have eased, vaccine hesitancy has arisen as the latest impediment to healthy aging. The risk of being harmed by a vaccine is much lower than the risk of being harmed by a disease that a vaccination might prevent. Notwithstanding the important role that vaccines play in supplementing aging immune systems, many seniors incorrectly believe that vaccines are either harmful or not useful for older adults.

Another issue that confounds public health officials in both the US and the UK is the inequality of healthy aging outcomes. Even with the UK’s assurance of access to healthcare for all, people of means tend to remain in better health as they age than people who live in poverty. A 2019 study that compared healthy aging based on income and wealth in four countries found than disparities were less significant in the UK and Japan than in the United States and China.

Race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status are factors that determine whether groups of people will age in good health. The Lancet editorial points out that aging people who have access to technology, healthcare, and palliative care — specialized care to improve quality of life and mitigate suffering — have better outcomes than those who don’t.

Call to Action

The Lancet editorial applauded the House of Lords for making concrete recommendations to meet the goal of making healthy aging a reality for everyone. Many of those recommendations call for increased government funding of essential research: studying the mechanism of aging, as opposed to age-related diseases; ending the exclusion of older people from clinical trials; and studying the social and environmental factors that affect health as people age.

Aging well is a goal that affects every life. Aging is inevitable. As the editorial reminds us, we are all on a continuum of age. “Achieving older life,” the editorial states, “should be something that we aspire to and celebrate, not fear.”

To assure that every person enjoys the same opportunity to age well, however, both government and the private sector must be committed to the principle that society must treat all of its members fairly and equally. Investing in research and programs that help every member of society age well should be a goal not just in the UK, but in every nation.

(This article has been updated June 2025 since it was originally published March 2021.)