Also FWIW … I get that you feel that facts should never get in the way of hyperbole, to me disregarding facts is gauche.
The United States is doing horribly on child health and mortality rates. A detailed analysis of the trends for the half century of 1961 to 2010 details it.
The fact we have so many more children dying per capita here than our peer nations, as a many decades trend, is awful. Inexcusable. And even with recent upticks statements like yours are not even accurate in comparison to a few decades past.
From that article, an analysis that rings even more true now, for children and all age groups:
DSeid - Didn’t know you were a pediatrician. Have you seen the following website? It summarizes UN mortality estimates by child age buckets (ages 5-9 or 10-14, for instance). The US doesn’t look so good.
We are horrible. Have been horrible. Getting worse. I could rant for pages but it includes how children’s interest were thrown under the bus during Covid AND how structural inequities impact them.
Inaccurate hyperbole is not needed to make that case. Reality is bad enough without exaggeration.
As to how to increase level of education, I suggest equalization of school funding – poor districts only get roughly half the funding of rich ones in my state, and our life expectancy isn’t good for a mostly blue state.
That’s my progressive suggestion.
My perhaps non-progressive suggestions are to make school mandatory until age 18 (as in California and highest-life-expectancy Hawaii), and then hire more truant officers to enforce it.
That’s sort of cargo cult thinking, though, isn’t it? If we mimic certain behaviors, the positive results should follow?
Just having kids forced to sit in class doesn’t really help the problems of structural inequality, i.e. it doesn’t help if the kids are starving and without adequate health care at school vs home. Worse, a change now doesn’t get reflected until decades down the road, if at all.
And it turns out those things (kids who are fed and have decent healthcare) produce better results in school. It’s a self-reinforcing positive feedback cycle.
Sure, every little bit helps but at the end of the day it still comes down to millions of adults, strongly clustered in certain parts of our country, deciding that maybe certain policies and political leanings maybe aren’t so great when it comes to the health and wellbeing of the average citizen. Or not, and they keep falling further and further behind.
And no matter what we do, it really is a matter of “it’ll get worse before it gets better” even if somebody snaps their fingers and suddenly attitudes and policies change overnight. Even for an individual, it takes a large amount of time and effort to significantly improve their lifestyle and health even with support.
I’m for universal health care. But isn’t it the case that a large portion of dropouts are eligible for free school lunches and Medicaid? When the dropout hits 18 with a bad job is when they lose Medicaid or similar health care eligibility. Also, with school funding equalization, more schools would serve breakfast and have on-site nurses.
I do have some uncertainty about why education is associated with longer life independent of correlates including income and race. If you just sit in school learning nothing, I’d think years of education wouldn’t matter.
One thing higher school funding, in currently underfunded districts, should go to is a more careful teacher hiring. It matters greatly who the teacher is.
Well, as it happens, a lot of the states (and this is one case where state level policy really does matter a lot) did not go for Medicaid expansion under the ACA. And, unsurprisingly, these are generally the states that are worst in life expectancy, high school graduation, etc.
So, in the worst states, they’re up the creek.
Another case where state level policy really makes a difference.
Check what just happened in Arkansas. Their ‘solution’ to teacher retention was to boost the minimum starting pay but basically not guarantee any future increases from state funding, leaving that to local school districts. Basically meaning, since there are a lot of poor districts, that teachers in the districts that need it most, i.e. the ones where the kids most need it, can expect to get few or more likely no raises in the future and lose good candidates to the wealthy (primarily urban/suburban) districts that are already paying above the new minimum. And this is state that is consistently near the bottom of the list in teacher pay.
Careful teacher hiring doesn’t matter if the state pretty much says they’re not interested in attracting or retaining decent candidates in the first place.
It’s been suggested earlier in the thread that state level policy has limited effect on life expectancy compared to local policy but it all really does hang together.
Red states that have refused additional Medicaid funding are seeing hospitals which would be the recipient of Medicaid payments closing, leaving many parts of the state without nearby health care. That surely has an impact on life expectancy and is a direct result of state policies.
But if those who are going to die are Democratic voters, perhaps the people who run these states see this as a feature, not a bug.
The FT recently looked at the difference in life expectancy between the US and other rich nations which is pretty data rich. As a bonus, the author also did a long twitter thread with even more graphs.
In terms of what is driving the difference with other countries, age of death is a huge factor. Life expectancy for those who reach 70 is pretty much the same between the US and Canada, the UK, France etc. But not at 5 or 25:
It’s “good” to see some data-driven confirmation of what I suspected earlier. It successfully makes the case that the NYT article did not.
State-level policy differences affecting availability in medical care aren’t the main driver in that 16-50 region where the differences are the worst. Even medical problems like obesity are not caused by the lack of health care.
It might be worth pointing out that Americans over age 70 have access to universal healthcare.
Yeah, we also have a problem with guns, drug addiction, and auto deaths. And that might be a lot of the difference. And the opioid epidemic is probably most of our non-covid decline in life expectancy. But i know several people who didn’t seek healthcare due to cost (or covid) and died prematurely.
Also, it’s not as though reduced access to healthcare and poor diet are completely distinct problems. People who can’t afford to get routine healthcare are missing out on a potential source of advice about good eating habits.
Improved lifestyle health is also associated with a bunch of other “socialistic” measures like freshly made school meals, walkable/bikeable communities, adequate public transport, and so on. Nanny State, like most other classic nannies, may be a bit stern and bossy, but at least she does generally see to it that you eat your vegetables and get proper exercise.
Yes there is an assured payment structure. But access is still very limited geographically for many, in many financially disadvantaged communities, both rural and inner city, for all from basic primary care to prompt access to emergent interventions that are lifesaving if they can be administered fairly promptly.