This is one of the first measures announced by candidate Emmanuel Macron if he is re-elected for a second term: to push back the legal retirement age to 65. An age when the French would no longer be in good enough health to work? Guest of Public Senate Tuesday, Eric Woerth, chairman of the Finance Committee of the National Assembly and supporter of the Head of State, came to defend this project. Arguing that this project “is not just a question of age, it’s the look we have on age at work”, he argued that “often, not for everyone”, “at 65 years, we are in great shape.
Aged 66, the deputy of Oise then proposed the establishment of “a pension system which is automatically indexed to life expectancy”. “It would avoid political debate and it would make it possible to have a national consensus on this. »
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Healthy life expectancy at birth is calculated by INSEE : it was close to 65 years old in 2020 and, in detail, 64.4 years old for men and 65.9 years old for women.
This life expectancy in good health “evaluates, at birth, the number of years that a person can expect to live without suffering from incapacity in the gestures of daily life, taking into account the sanitary conditions of the moment”, explains the ‘INSEE, which is based on data from the European body Eurostat.
Life expectancy without severe disability is a little higher: it was 73.8 years for men at birth in 2020, and 77.9 years for women, according to DREES calculationsthe ministerial body responsible for statistics.
What about the disability-free life expectancy of current sixty-somethings? The Drees calculates it at 10.6 years for men aged 65 and 12.1 years for women. This life expectancy without incapacity appreciates, like the life expectancy in good health, “the number of years that a person can expect to live without suffering from incapacity in the gestures of daily life”, details the Drees.
Silent figures on the socio-professional level
However, these indicators do not reflect the living and working conditions of the profession. In other words, does a worker or an employee have the same life expectancy in good health as a senior executive? He there is a gap between the wealthiest and the poorest for life expectancy at birth (13 years in 2018 between the wealthiest and poorest men and eight years for the wealthiest and poorest women). Is this gap also reflected in healthy life expectancy? None of the three statistical services has data on the subject according to socio-professional categories.
The latest data available dates back to a survey conducted in 2003. This showed that male workers have, at age 35, a disability-free life expectancy ten years lower than that of senior executives. For women, there was an eight-year gap between these two socio-professional categories.