I agree it makes things more complex, but we aren't in fact pro-longing our lives that much. Life expectancy for whites (to take out the effect of demographic changes) at age 65 has gone up all of 5 years since 1950, and life expectancy at age 75 has gone up less than 2 years since 1980 (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2011/022.pdf). Indeed, even much of that difference can be explained by advances in treatment of relatively mundane things like heart attacks that would otherwise kill people in their late 60's, rather than complex care to extend life at the end. That is to say that much of the difference is due to more people making it to 70 and less due to more people making it to 90+.
With you all the way, overall longevity is much the same, but the way we go has changed a great deal.
I don't know if I'd consider heart attacks mundane, they've just become that given western diets. heart attack used to be rarer 100 years ago, but now a combination of longer life and diets that have more negative cardiac impact leads to the growth of heart attack and the subsequent research and improvement in cardiac intervention that can be seen in healthcare today. We've made them mundane through our collective wild ass lifestyle choices.
