Seniors are on average the wealthiest group, even if earned income is
low. What are you looking for?

A study about what?

And that would be what?

IIRC, major illness can seriously deplete one's life savings.

OK, I'll spell it out further: between *average* length of life and
socieconomic class.

Major illness does seriously deplete a life's savings -- it depleted my
father's, who had bought one house and built another through a lifetime of
hard work and savings. When it was over for him, his widow had to stay at
her job to support herself, at an age when most people were thinking of
retirment.  (In personal fact, radical illness is bidding fair to decrease
my own mite, even though I'm not quite dead yet.)

Ir seems the upper and upper-middle classes are more and more protected by
trust funds, which own (and pay nominal taxes on) assets, while
administering them for the benefit the trustee -- but such assets are not
necessarily liable for medical expenses because, by that legal fiction,
they don't actually belong to the patient.  

Also there is the question of heatlh insurance.  The more you can afford
to pay out of your monthly income for insurance, the more likely you are
to be able to afford a good plan, i.e. one that gives you real options to
choose from in treatment.  Some HMOs, adequate in other respects, will in
affect not allow their clients to be seen at hospitals where the rates are
significantly higher than average (the doctors generally don't want to
bother with those HMOs) -- and the outcome rate (survival, post-surical
quality of life, etc.) is also above average.

Surely this has been in effect long enough to influence the census
figures, or at least send some people, looking for an easy PhD thesis,
crunching more up-to-date numbers?

Changstein