It seems that the US is getting worse on almost every metric around life expectancy. No matter how you slice the data, we are dying earlier. And the causes are across the spectrum: gun deaths, accidents, overdoses, suicides, COVID, obesity-related lifestyle diseases. It’s amazing to be the richest country in the world, but it doesn’t benefit our population at large.
The good news is that many of the causes are preventable or can at least be defended against without a superhuman effort. So, personal behavior and lifestyle changes would help markedly. Also, an increase in social responsibility would help.
Good luck with that.
Well, aren’t you a ray of sunshine! 
Provide quality basic health care to more people, make medicines affordable, avoid pandemics.
Exactly. Changing personal behavior and lifestyle is exactly what requires superhuman effort. Way more so than than the advancements made by Lister, Fleming, Semmelweis, and so forth. For what it’s worth, I count myself among those who would benefit markedly from lifestyle change, but been unable to implement those changes.
I think of it as one of those things that’s extremely simple but extremely difficult.
ETA. As for the why, one major contributor is high fructose corn syrup. We’re reaching the time where the first generation raised on that stuff are now reaching middle age, and it’s showing. There’s a lot of things that can fall under the umbrella of lifestyle that need changing, but getting rid of high fructose corn syrup is probably the one individual thing that would have most benefit.
Based solely on personal observations and personal experience, it’s highly addictive, more so than opiates, cocaine, and alcohol (although less so than nicotine). It won’t kill you in the short run like those other things, but it’s almost as bad in the long run when consumed in high doses.
Apologies if this is a little more of an IMHO response than GD, but I think it’s clear that a huge bulk of our healthcare efforts are spent finding medical solutions to problems that we’ve created ourselves as a direct result of social/economic structures that we have chosen. Food systems and food industries, sedentary work and sedentary entertainment. High stress/high risk economic status quo.
We’ve created and continue to exalt many destructive systems that kill people, and then expect them to cover the ever-rising costs of the medical remediation of the outcomes of those systems.
Medicine is not going to win this “arms race”. Until we commit to making the changes at a societal/governmental level that would give people more security, more time and more comfort, possibly coupled with less readily available “junk” to consume, both physically and spiritually, we’re going to continue to see health outcomes worsen for an ever increasing middle/lower class population.
Boost the social safety net and provide health care coverage for everyone. The same way the rest of the world maximizes lifespans.
Please look at the chart carefully. It says that life expectancy was nearly unchanged from 2014 to 2019. During that time life expectancy was about four and a half years greater than what it had been in 1980. So life expectancy has shrunk noticeably only during 2020 and 2021. (Hmm, has something happened over the past three years to cause this?) This does not make the U.S. look particularly good. The life expectancy is something like six years longer in many countries which are usually considered equal economically with the U.S. But the headline makes it sound like the life expectancy has been shrinking for a long time.
The accompanying chart shows life expectancy in the US falling further and further behind comparator countries since the early 1980s, then more or less flatlining from about 2010 while comparator countries continued to improve, and finally suffering a much steeper and longer-lasting Covid-related fall than in comparator countries. So I don’t think we’re dealing with a phenomenon that only emerged in the past two or three years.
Why look at the national average as a single number?
There’s a well known correlation between life expectancy and income. At the upper end of income, life expectancy is right up there with other developed nations.
Is the drop in life expectancy more pronounced or even occur entirely at the lowest income levels?
If so, you can look at diet, exercise, etc all you want, but that seems to be looking in the wrong places (though still important for overall health - just not “the” explanation for the drop).
ETA: or, as already stated earlier in the thread:
I think, to fix it, you basically will need to tax and subsidize food products to encourage people to eat more healthily. If it costs $2 for a carrot and $1 for a cheese burger, people are going to go for the cheeseburger. If you can make the carrot $0.50 and the burger $2.50 then you’re getting into the territory where people are going to snack a bit more healthily.
(Not real numbers. Don’t nitpick it. There’s some price point where the change happens. Even if it currently is $0.50 and $2.50, that just says the ratio needs to get bigger, still.)
Any/all tax policy affects the poor and working class far more than it affects anyone farther up the economic ladder.
You quintuple the price of a Big Mac and I totally Do. Not. Care. You double the price of a McD’s value meal and a million poor kids go hungry tonight. And tomorrow night. And …
Forcing the poor to “eat healthy” then denying them medical care because in this country that’s pay-as-you-go-if-you-can seems a double cruelty.
Most of these medical issues are directly or indirectly tied to SES. Crappy schools, crappy residences, crappy neighborhoods, long hours, two jobs, no medical care, etc. All of those are down to a system designed to make the top ~10% happy and the rest are ignored. While actively limiting generational progress insofar as possible.
Fix rampant SES inequality and everything else will follow within a generation. Don’t fix it and nothing else will ever be more than a bandaid on a shotgun wound.
And thus subsidies.
If you can still get all the calories for the same price then there’s no net effect on hunger rates. But if the nutritional profile changes to something better, without any net change in calories per dollar, then you’ve made the world a better place.
Good point. Getting the legislative folks to approve both the tax rises and the subsidies and agree that they’ll be kept in lockstep every year would be a neat feat.
And, every time McDonalds gets more efficient or finds a cheaper source, don’t forget to raise the subsidies!
Some part of the decline in life expectancy is from deaths of despair – suicides and drug overdoses due to lack of opportunities in poor areas of the country. That’s not going to be solved with any food taxes and subsidies.
This is what groups like the USDA and FDA are for. You cede a little bit of control to them, large enough to maintain a standard, and put the political blame for the fallout on them every year - even though they’re just doing what you told them to do.
Win win.
(Note: Federal agencies can control taxes)
I think from 2014 to 2019, the US lost ground against other comparable countries. So yes, it technically flattened during that period, some years up, some years down. The key though is how we’ve fared relative to other countries over the longer haul. And it’s gotten progressively worse. And it was worse during the pandemic than almost any other comparable nation.
It seems like a country with our wealth and economic means could attain an 80 year average lifespan. We’ve got a lot of ground to catch up.
The article actually points out that our upper-income people actually don’t do as well as other country’s upper-income folks.
edit: Actually, as I read the article and looked at the link, it might not be saying what I thought it said. Anyway…
It’s all part of the plan to save Social Security.