Congratulations. You're going to live. A good long time, in fact, according to the latest aging and demographic research.

If you turned 60 today, you could expect to see 90. If you're in your late 40s now, who knows? You might make it to 100, maybe 105. The birthrate has been in decline for the last decade, the huge baby boom generation is just now reaching middle age and all of us are living longer than ever before. Longer, certainly, than most of us ever planned for.

If you're like any American who figured they'd already seen middle age come and go, it might be time to ask yourself some hard questions. Are your retirement plans sufficient to see you through to the far side of 90? Where will you live? Do you have enough money to carry yourself and your family through the next 40 years?

Sobering questions even for the young, considering the dramatic changes in store for aging in America. Consider:

-- The U.S. Commissioner on Aging predicts that the number of elderly people nationwide will more than double in the next 40 years.

-- By 2025, people over 65 will outnumber teenagers two to one, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Population Reference Bureau. -

- By 2090, the number of people 80 and over--the "oldest old," the nation's fastest- growing age group--will double.

Now consider the apparent phobia that American society has about age. When people think of aging, they generally picture nursing homes filled with sick, burdensome, senile and dying people, even though nationally only five percent of older people live in nursing homes at any one time. The question of what happens to our minds and bodies when we age is generally avoided, almost taboo. Unless they're trying hard for the elderly as a target market, advertisers often steer clear of white-haired models even for ads touting arthritis pain-relievers or hair color designed to wash away the gray.

Elderly Americans are typically forced to deal with this stigma in the workplace. Businesses still routinely drop their older workers at the first sign of economic problems, often with severance packages that won't see them through the next few years, much less to the end of life. Health care, breathtakingly expensive now, will probably get more so, and decreasing numbers of employers are including health care as a pre-paid part of their workers' retirement packages. Add to this the plight of many grandparents who've been asked to help their children with financial problems, effectively making them parents again and whittling away what they might have saved for their last years.

"Here is the gut issue," opines Bentley Lipscomb, Secretary for the Florida Department of Elder Affairs. "We have extended life expectancy by 20 years and society hasn't changed to reflect that one bit. People just didn't plan on living as long as they are. That's a radical shift. It's going to be a whole different world."

Ready to help us get there and understand what's happening along the way is the Pepper Institute on Aging at Florida State. Founded in 1976 with a grant from the U.S. Administration on Aging and support from the university's College of Social Sciences, the institute's seven faculty members and dozen affiliate members coordinate all FSU- based research on the aging process with a special concentration on the social, economic and political environments that affect the way we age.

While most university-based research institutes on aging across the country deal mainly with the medical and psychological issues surrounding the aging process, the Pepper Institute's social-science focus has allowed it to emerge as a prominent leader in examining the public and political institutions that shape the lives of the elderly. The institute's working relationship with state government has established it as one of the clearer heads in the increasingly raucous debate over long- term health care and quality of life for Florida retirees. Since there are more elderly here than anywhere else in the country and more are obviously on the way, the help has come none too soon.

"I tell the legislators, 'you spent 40 years convincing everybody to come down to Florida and retire...well...they're here," notes Lipscomb. "We're going to have to show the rest of the country how to take care of this problem, and Florida doesn't even understand it's a problem yet."

Debunking the Myths The field of gerontology has been around U.S. universities since the '50s, and has contributed to much of what we know about getting older as a process. But in the last several years, many researchers in the field of aging have taken care to distinguish their work from that of gerontology, which is thought to approach aging largely in terms of loss: of vitality and independence, of memory, of family and friends, of youth itself.

For instance, it's widely thought that elderly people, almost as a matter of course, can expect to gradually but completely lose their mental capacity to senility, now more often referred to as dementia. But new findings by aging researchers are beginning to expose senility for what it all too often really is: a throwaway diagnosis. Aging research shows that fewer than 15 percent of people over 65 ever develop mental problems. Time and time again, normal garden-variety depression, everyday confusion and reactions to stress caused by loneliness, or by being shuttled off to a nursing home, is misdiagnosed as dementia.

"Senility has been a label," says Dr. Marie Cowart (Dr.P.H. Columbia), a Pepper Institute research associate and past director who avoids the term "gerontology" because of its negative connotations. She points out another perception problem; one that's just come to a head lately in the national media. "Older bodies don't metabolize medications as well as younger bodies do. With the wide use of medicationsÑand particularly using the same dosage for older as well as younger peopleÑsometimes 'senility' may be drug overdose or incompatibility of two or three medications.

"A lot of people see an older person simply not functioning well, and they immediately think, 'oh, well, they're senile.' They jump to conclusions. I always say: think about a person you think is senile, and imagine if that person was 35 years old. If we treated older people as we do 35-year olds, labeling wouldn't be a problem."

Cowart's viewpoint directly points up the stigma inherent in our outlook on age: that older people are treated differently, set apart from the rest of the population, that aging is often thought of as a problem rather than a natural progression, and that the whole issue is fraught with misunderstanding and fear.

To writers Betty Friedan, Erica Jong and Gloria Steinem, all of whom have authored books on aging in the past year, society's treatment of older people today mirrors its treatment of women before feminism. By setting aside older people as "untouchables," those of us who can't face the reality of aging don't have to. "Seeing age only as decline from youth, we make age itself the problem," Friedan writes, "and never face the real problems that keep us from evolving and leading continually useful, vital, and productive lives."

Retirement Roulette Since the advent of U.S. Social Security in 1935, American society has expected that after 65 an individual should be ready to retire from the work force. That 65th birthday, set arbitrarily by German chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1884, was optimistic back then, when life expectancy peaked at 37 years. Given what we know of our current life expectancy, those numbers just don't mean anything anymore. If our senior citizens can expect to see 75 and have a good shot at 90, 60 starts to look--and feel-- awfully young to them. They might not want to stop working-- and they might not be able to afford to, either.

"Accepting a pension and moving out of the labor force may seem like a great deal at the time," says Dr. Melissa Hardy (Ph.D. Indiana), the institute's director of research. She studies retirement, economic and age discrimination issues. "But then often you're looking at another 20 years of non-work activity. That's 20 years of dependence on these pension programs. And now, with the cost of health insurance skyrocketing, employers are trying to find a way to shift the cost onto the retirees."

Hardy also points out that businesses don't adjust pensions for inflation once the worker retires. So the longer they rely on a pension, the more fragile their financial situations become.

Institute Director Dr. John Myles (Ph.D. Wisconsin) notes that traditional employer pensions are being replaced by employee- driven plans such as 401Ks, which leave the saving and investing up to the employee.

"They may save it, they may spend it," he says. "We're concerned about the future of 401K plans because some of these people will be winners and some will be losers."

For many businesses attempting to escape financial straits by downsizing, retirement means getting rid of your older workers through pension incentives to save the extra money they cost in health care and salaries. Business then paints a rosy picture of these "voluntary" retirements, which some workers feel under pressure to accept.

A study of retired auto workers conducted in 1991 by Hardy and Pepper Eminent Scholar Dr. Jill Quadagno (Ph.D. Kansas) found that early retirement buy-outs offered by the auto industry stood out as not the best choice for the workers, but made some workers feel trapped between the option of early retirement and the risk of indefinite layoff.

"The problem now is that industry has bought people out at age 55 for economic reasons with $25,000 retirement packages so they don't have to pay their salaries and continue their benefits," Cowart says. "Sometimes those early retirements are putting people who were mid-career managers into precarious situations. It's devastating."

Myles also laments the fact that, though we've moved from being a heavy industry- oriented to a service-oriented marketplace, businesses' first response to economic problems still is to dump the older workers.

Nationwide, only three percent of the work force is aged 65 or older; only 11 percent are aged 44-64. The prevalent notion in U.S. businesses is that older workers cost more to keep and train. While people over 60 have long asserted that they're able to learn just about anything a 20-year-old can and are often much more focused on their work, business has clung desperately to the cliche, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks."

The Social Security Blanket Institute researchers agree: Social Security works. It's the most successful government program this country's ever had, they assert, and it helps keep 90 percent of this country's senior citizens alive. It might not be enough for those trying to live on it; it might be too high of a deduction from younger workers' paychecks every week. But it works.

"The big question that we always get asked is, 'will Social Security be there for me when I get older?' And our answer is yes," Myles says. "It might be modified; some rules might change, but it will be there. It will have to be there because we can't live without it."

Social Security fuels a lot of the fires between younger generations and older people. Baby boomers and Generation Xers have often pointed their collective finger at the elderly, charging them with "using up all the Social Security" before they have a chance to get old. These comparative youngsters have been known to rail against senior citizens' restaurant discounts while they pay full price. But these "special breaks" for the elderly amount to little more than marketing techniques and symbolism, Hardy asserts, and give Social Security a bad name it doesn't deserve.

"The fact that so many elderly people are able to live on their own; that their children can count on that continued independence; is due to Social Security. It allows older people independence. It doesn't make them wealthy. It allows them to get by.

"Think about where we startedÑthat gerontology centers focused on the negative aspects of aging. Now aging is portrayed in a much more positive way, as something that is not to be feared because people can count on certain givens. One of those givens is Social Security."

Both Myles and Quadagno, editor of Aging, the Individual and Society (Academic Press, 1982) and The Transformation of Old Age Security: Class and Politics in the American Welfare State (University of Chicago Press, 1988), study comparative social programs in the U.S., Canada, Australia and Europe and have found that the U.S. repeatedly lags behind these countries in most social policies.

Myles contends that several European nations have for years faced the same issues in aging and social policy as the U.S. is now bracing for, and come through fine, all things considered.

"Many of these countries, such as Germany, have instituted much more generous programs and have a higher proportion of elderly, and they haven't fallen apart," he says. Still, in terms of U.S. social policy, "these issues are going to be around for the next 50 years. There's going to be lots to do for a long time."

If any one group gets the short stick in this debate, rest assured it's not the younger generations. It's more likely to be the women. Elderly women continue to outlive their husbands, and their claim to the family fortune is more likely to have been established through dependency. Hardy's research on income inequity shows they have the second highest rate of poverty, behind single mothers with children. And minority women face a "double jeopardy." They're women, and they're minorities: that's two strikes.

"The more disadvantaged you are in terms of the way social and economic benefits are distributed, the higher your risk is going to be," Hardy explains. "You add one set of disadvantages on top of another. So the risk is higher for minority women than either African-American men or white women."

It's no surprise that minorities make up a disproportionate amount of the nation's poor. But institute research associate Dr. Fred Seamon (Ph.D. Florida State) has found that elderly minorities are shouldering a huge amount of the problems their children are facing with drugs and crime. When their children lose their jobs and homes to drug habits, Seamon says, elderly parents often take them back in. Their grandchildren move in, too. Then these elderly peoples' pensions and Social Security checks, meant for one or two people, are expected to cover three generations under the same roof.

"Some of these people have been physically and verbally abused. They've had their Social Security checks, their credit cards, all their money stolen. I've talked with people who have literally had everything taken. Everything."

Florida's Health-Care Swamp Even the healthiest of senior citizens will tell you that though they might be fine now, the subject of what they'd do if they ever needed long-term medical care--whether in their own home or a nursing home--is never far from their minds. Florida's elderly population is finding that though you can never really be physically ready for this type of adjustment, you'd better be financially ready. And financial readiness is becoming next to impossible.

In one sense, Florida is no different than any other state: long- term care is staggeringly expensive. If you need in-home care, plan on spending an average of $35,000-$50,000 per year, researchers say. If you still stay at home once your money is gone, state Community Care for the Elderly takes over. This program spends $1,700 per elderly resident per year, and, as Cowart says, "It's just not funded to do a good job. It's spread so thin that it probably hits about one percent of Florida's elderly population."

Currently, 9,000 Floridians are on a waiting list to receive care or changes in the appointed levels of care this plan is supposed to provide. The state agencies governing care for the elderly are swamped todayÑnever mind what'll happen when the state's elderly population doubles.

Nursing homes are a different story. Studies show that most peoples' savings lasts an average of only 67 days once they enter a nursing home. Though Medicare is often thought to cover the cost of nursing-home stays, it in fact covers only two percent. Medicaid covers up to half of this cost, but requires that you get rid of most of your assets first. You're allowed to keep no more than $2,000 in savings or other liquid assets, one car valued at under $5,000, virtually no jewelry, and sometimes your home.

Florida's Medicaid budget covers $30,000 per person per year for Medicaid, the budget for which tops $1 billion this year and is steadily rising at the rate of 20 percent per year.

"You tell me why we're shuttling people into nursing homes when it cost less for them to stay home and that's what they want to do in the first place," Lipscomb says. "What the people want costs much less than what the government wants to shove down their throats."

Hardy is only a bit more sanguine as she looks at the future of long-term care in Florida.

"There will be an increasing need for home care assistance for people who don't need 24-hour care. As long as you can make an initial investment in a full-service retirement community and pay the couple thousand dollars in rent every month that it tends to cost you, you can be taken care of. But that's only available to a small portion of people who are going to need assistance."

Pills vs. Bills Increasingly, studies are finding that even those who have adequate insurance are faced with mounting bills for long-term health care they can't pay. It's a fear that stretches across both age and economic boundaries and fuels a huge mistrust of the existing health-care system.

"It used to be that, when you got older, you just went to the mom-and-pop rooming house down the street, and it didn't cost too much to do that," Cowart said. "Then came corporatization, the mom-and-pop operations closed, and we began to see larger facilities owned by the for-profit sector, owned by multinational chains. Corporatization has accelerated costs because it's intoduced competition where previously it wasn't part of the health-care environment."

Cowart admits that the corporatization of the health-care industry has helped standardize and improve conditions for patients in nursing homes across the country. The picture of nursing homes used to be one of bedsores, catheters and patients tied to their wheelchairs, parked in front of the TV. Now patients are being trained in safety and avoiding incontinence, and their rights are protected by omnibus councils. But such improvements have come at a high price. People now pay through the nose for these types of facilities. "

It's really a real-estate business," Cowart says. "Nursing homes change hands from year to year, and just the mortgage fees as they buy and sell the properties is enough to cause a tremendous increase in the cost. I think corporatization of the health care system has been our downfall."

Cowart has most recently worked with Quadagno to evaluate the long-term care part of the Clinton Administration's Health Care Reform Plan, which Cowart says goes a long way toward assuring disabled Americans the coverage they need without differentiating by age and so doesn't fuel any generational fights.

As this issue went to press, the institute held a national policy conference on the subject, with speakers from academia, government and industry, to study the future of long-term care in America. Cowart is proud of the institute's work and of the Clinton administration's, but she's not optimistic about when any of it will see the light of day.

"I think this country will be very conservative in passing any kind of health-care reform, and the long-term care part of it doesn't seem to be a priority," she said, echoing the feelings of a lot of older Americans who have pushed for more comprehensive, less expensive health care. Tallahassee's city- funded Senior Center joined the local chapter of the American Association for Retired Persons and hundreds of other elderly organizations around the country who journeyed to Washington D.C. to rally for the single-payer plan this summer.

"What we have now is government by interest groups, both at the state and federal level. As long as that's true, we're going to have a hard time passing the kind of legislation that does the best for the people. Instead we get laws that do the best for the corporate sector."

Serious health-care reform, if and when it comes, won't be complete if it doesn't address what has become a national concern among the elderly--how much health care is too much? So much more is possible in medicine now than when today's elderly were growing up that many are troubled by the ramifications of so-called "miracle-medicine." Many are skeptical whether today's wonder drugs and super surgeries will improve the quality of their lives or just postpone the inevitable until it exhausts their finances.

Dr. Henry Glick, an institute research associate and author of The Right to Die (Columbia University Press, 1992), told Research in Review last fall that "It's clear that the majority of people want to be able to avoid being kept alive through heroic measures. Almost no one wants a technologically prolonged death." West Coast native Vivian Allen, 77, is among many who struggle daily with the dilemma. "I wonder if, by extending our overall health by so many years, we aren't kind of overreaching what nature intended for our bodies," she said, pointing to her artificial knee. "How many times is an older person supposed to go through very painful, very expensive, very miserable repair jobs?"

The Good News If there is a bright side to getting older, it's that more and more people are bucking the stereotypes of decline, winking at the very narrow conventions that define old age and then living out the rest of their years more or less as they please. They're healthier, more involved and content to either relax and enjoy retirement or keep working as long as they feel like working, no matter what their friends, kids or society have to say about it.

Most of the senior citizens interviewed for this article didn't bother to wait until they got older to finally kick back after a lifetime of working. They thought of retirement as the next logical step in a long, active life.

"I'm grateful for the privilege that I had of traveling all around the world," says retired teacher Betty Yuhas, 83. "I've heard so many people say, well, I'm going to wait until I retire and then I can do this, this and this. Then they retire and two years later they're dead. They didn't accomplish anything."

Retired ophthalmologist Harry Horwich, 70, explains a personal philosophy embraced by a lot of elderly people: "There's an old saying that you have to have something to do, someone to love and something to look forward to. All these things are attainable at any age."

If you're smart, conventional wisdom says, you don't let age get to you. You develop a strong support system. You keep learning, growing and surviving, and if anybody tells you to act your age, you tell them to take a walk.

Cowart's research has shown her that the changing face of age is an opportunity to extend one's enjoyment of life considerably beyond what previous generations ever imagined possible.

"Think about the fact that in 1935, when Social Security was passed in this country, 65 was near death. Now 65 is beginning. We're not just living longer, we're living better. We're healthier. We're staying productive. I think that's pretty exciting."