I totally agree with this.
I have not read the whole thread but I just saw this article by Paul Krugman, who reports that the Medicare trustees say that although life expectancies in blue states are close to other advanced nations, the red states are doing much worse. I thought it would be relevant here.
Here’s a gift link.
You wasted a gift link! I already posted one to that article.
Already posted in #98 but thanks for reminding us. It’s definitely a worthwhile read.
Sure, no argument there. I would say that’s a slightly different claim, though. If, say, the population is already vaccine/mask hesitant, they are likely to have already voted for people with the same views. And so the state takes no action to encourage those things. The opposite will be true of a state without such hesitancy. In either case, though, it’s not really the state that’s the driving force. And it’s unclear if different action by the state could enable change, if the population is not already amenable to it.
That’s what I get for posting before reading the whole thread.
There’s some potentially good news on the US Life Expectancy front, with a huge caveat.
If this paper holds up, then our expectancy popped up in 2022 by over a year, to about 77.5 or so. This represents the drop-off of Covid deaths mostly. We’ll see how accurate this estimate is. The caveat is this is not official, as they don’t have all the data that the CDC/NHS will have when they do the official calculation later this year. This group’s methodology did come within about 0.1 in previous years of the actual final calcs. So, maybe this holds up.
It’s also not enough. Getting to 77.5 is still almost a full year-and-a-half less than the pre-pandemic peak of 78.9. We still are having a few hundred deaths per day from Covid. And we’ll be challenged - I think - to get back to the pre-pandemic numbers anytime soon. I hope I’m wrong, and the snapback happens by 2023. So many trends are working against us, that it’s hard to see how we get back to the “good ol’ days”…
If COVID is, as I expect, a permanent part of the human landscape, then it will be exerting a downward pressure every year into the future. It is a novel new threat we did not have. It’s 100% in addition to, not instead of, the pre-COVID era health threats stretching back to Og & Grog in the cave with all their little cave babies.
So it would be completely reasonable that COVID will represent a one-time secular shift to lower expectancy across the board. That will only be reversed by the cumulative progress of future medical science, future nutrition science, or future public behavior modification. Those three are each moving targets but there’s not a lot of easily picked low-hanging fruit in any of them.
It might be a decade or three before we next surpass the prior record. Of course that’s assuming no new novel health threats emerge. AGW for the win, anyone?
And that will be particularly tough in America where the Covid shift is larger than most other countries. Our ability to get beyond the previous American record of 78.9 years is stressed by the fact that prior to the pandemic, our life expectancy had flattened for the most part since about 2010. So, we need an improvement of trend compared to the previous “normal”, while simultaneously dealing with a virus that’s still killing us moreso than other countries.
This makes me think we will just fall further behind other peer countries.
We’re Number One!!!
Everybody is good for something. Us / US? We’re a bad example.
It is easy for a pessimist to convince themselves the high water mark of humanity (by whatever measure) was last week if not 5 years ago. Between natural resource exhaustion, air/water pollution, & AGW, still unbridled population growth, the quad-fecta of Putin, Xi, Modi, and perhaps Trump in charge of ~40% of humanity and 95% of the wealth & weaponry, and the overweaning power of internet-fueled propaganda to rouse the rabble everywhere, omens look unfavorable at best.
But still we can persevere. It just takes work.
I just refound a column that should be of interest.
The answer is bad health care. Chronic conditions ooze over state lines but Medicaid-expansion holdouts do not. Areas with lower health insurance also conform to state boundaries.
Some local areas buck the trend. But the blame for bad health care lies at the state level.
This is not a surprise at all. I live in the Deep South, BTW. I see alot of people with very bad health and chronic conditions, and it cuts across different socio-economic groups. Obesity, in particular, is bad in the South. The rest of the nation has plenty of it, but not as much as we do down South.
NYT opinion piece on why American life expectancy is going down (gift link):
That’s a good article by David Wallace Wells. He summarizes alot of the most recent research. The focus on mortality for children or young adults is striking.
I would say it’s an extremely poor article. It’s missing the one figure necessary to support the thesis: the number of years taken off life expectancy from those youth factors. Instead, it’s filled with numerous relative percentages, which are useless because they don’t come with a base rate. A 10% increase in whatever is useless when you don’t know if the base rate was 0.02% or 20%.
The missing information doesn’t mean he’s wrong, of course. Some of it can be partially inferred: for instance, there’s the figure that 1 in 25 American 5-year-olds won’t live to be 40. Perhaps the average in that range is a death at 30, and assuming “normal” lifetime is 80, that implies deaths in that range take off 4%*50=2 years of life. It is supposedly 4 times as high as in other countries, meaning that the delta is 1.5 years.
But that’s making a lot of suppositions, and in any case can’t be extended to the other figures like firearm or other deaths. So it’s unknown how those contribute.
Agree w @Dr.Strangelove. The tone is compelling. The story is not supported by data within the article. Is it supported by real data? Probably but we can’t tell. For the NYT that’s certainly forgivable; it isn’t an academic journal, nor is it meant to be.
The rest of the meta-story is real disturbing. It basically says if you’re a white child or any kind of 25+ yo who isn’t in the drug scene, you’re doing about as well as anyone anywhere. COVID’s unhelpful, but that’s true worldwide. Yes, it’s a bit less helpful in the USA than other rich countries, but barely.
OTOH, if you’re a non-white youth, or a drug user, or somebody w depression / suicide issues you’re screwed with a capital S. And of course if that is indeed the message we can see how the Left and the Reactionary Right can read that situation for completely different causes and completely different remedies.
The opinion section, too. It’s not that I’m expecting any better. I just have a general dissatisfaction with this kind of article that uses scary-sounding statistics that don’t actually support the thesis. All the worse if the story is actually true. Which might well be the case.
It both is and isn’t.
It is misleading but not inaccurate: stating that kids deaths are part of our poor life expectancy “increasingly” and implying that such is now more the cause than deaths later. Of course he never actually supports the implication; he instead strongly supports the statement.
His aim though is not to answer that specific question factually, but to make people care about the underlying issues.
Our society’s increasing death rates of our young is a travesty. His pointing out the role of violence and gun violence in particular in that travesty is on point. His highlighting how the costs of that are inequitably carried is accurate.
hidden post, please don't reply
FFS.
You guys (the US) are killing your kids in numbers not seen since the dark ages and people in this thread are seriously discussing if that is or isn’t what is bringing life expectancy down.
What the fuck is wrong with you?
What the fuck is wrong with me is that I try to answer precise questions honestly and accurately, avoiding imposing my personal priorities onto the question. It’s a quirk I have.
No one here disputes the horribleness of childhood deaths increasing. I’m a pediatrician myself, and the manner in which this country’s problems impact kids is a big deal to me. I also think that kids’ lives being cut short and their life expectancies, having many more years potentially ahead of them, should matter more than my group’s do. Even from a purely economic perspective. I want kids’ issues prioritized.
But the problem of framing the discussion as a “think of the kids!” issue is that it potentially ignores other aspects that may be even more horrific, even if not as easy to push emotional buttons over. Fat fifty year olds needlessly dying by the millions may not be as emotionally triggering but they matter too.
There is a place for cold hearted analysis. Guns and cars need not be ignored, but the bigger problem is more structural … and needs attention, even if it bores some in comparison.