A new study examining health conditions during old age has found that people in the U.S. are not only living longer than ever but are also spending their final years in better fitness—with fewer limitations—than previous generations did.

The authors used a dataset called the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey to track how various Americans fared from one year to the next between roughly 1993 and 2017. Over that period, the life expectancy of someone at age 66 increased by 2.4 years, and those additional years consisted “entirely” of healthy life-years—free of the physical and cognitive limitations that often come with age. What’s more, time spent in a state of having severe physical or cognitive limitations declined by about 30%, which actually reduced expected nursing home and home-health use.

Increases in life expectancy can be attributed to delayed aging or prolonged dying, and this work suggests that delayed aging is behind these gains. While the authors don’t have data explaining precisely why people are living better near the end of their lives, another recent paper speculated that better pharmaceutical interventions and improved public-health efforts—such as campaigns to reduce smoking—may be helping.

“What we’re finding is that at every age, health is improving,” says Amy Finkelstein, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the authors of the working paper, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research on June 22. “We’re not just living longer; we’re living better.” She added: “So much of what we do in economics is sound alarm bells and be the Debbie Downer in the room, but this is actually a really positive story.”

Financially, however, it’s not all positive. Longer life expectancies mean more spending for already troubled government programs like Medicare and Social Security—and for older people themselves. Social Security is expected to be insolvent under its current trajectory by 2032, and expected lifetime Social Security spending was up 14% because of these demographic changes. But there’s a silver lining there, too. Women in particular were found to spend less time in the worst morbidity state. And expected Medicare spending was up just 6%—less than anticipated with higher life expectancy—largely because people are in better shape at the end of their lives and need fewer health interventions.

The amount of time they are expected to spend in nursing homes and with home health aides, the authors say, may even decrease. This, they say, stands in “stark contrast” to the widespread conventional wisdom among economists that life expectancy increases will put substantial pressure on long-term care facilities and nursing homes, raising hope that our last days might not be our worst.