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| Source: The Economist Does not include 2017 & 2018 data. |
From Science Alert:
The US is the only wealthy country in the world where the life expectancy needle is moving the wrong way.
Between 1959 and 2014, the average length of time that Americans were expected to live was on the rise. Now, for the third year in a row, it's declining, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
"Americans operate under a lot of misconceptions about how superior we are in many facets of our lives and this is not one of them," the study's lead author Steven Woolf told Business Insider. "We may think we have best medical care in world and highest life expectancy … but that's not the case."
This decline can't be linked to just one ethnicity, gender, or geographic area, either: It originates among an entire age group. People between the ages of 25 and 64 in the US are dying at higher rates, wracked by health problems like opioid addiction, obesity, alcoholic liver disease, and suicide.
Despite having the highest per capita health care spending in the world, Americans are "more likely to die before age 65 than people in other countries," Woolf added. "Their children, too, are less likely to live as long".
Woolf and his co-author Heidi Schoomaker's new study looked at more than 50 years' worth of data on US life expectancy from the US Mortality Database and the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention's WONDER database.
Results showed that, in the 1970s, the country experienced a rapid and significant jump in life expectancy. But by the 1990s, that increase started to level off. In 2011, US life expectancy plateaued, and three years later it started to drop.
"We've reached the point where we're going into a free fall," Woolf said.
Medical advances, particularly in the realms of cancer treatment and heart health, prompted an almost 10-year increase in the average American's lifespan. Between 1959 and 2013, life expectancy rose from 69.9 years to 78.9 years. Now, however, that average has dropped to 78.6 years.
The news isn't good if you compare it to other countries, either. In 1960, Americans had the highest life expectancy of any country in the world. But in the past couple of years, the US has plummeted to the bottom of the list of countries with a similar GDP and high average income, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
In fact, the US is currently ranked in the mid-40s globally in terms of life expectancy, squished between countries like Lebanon, Cuba, and Chile, which have GDPs that fall far short of our own.
This counterintuitive trend – of an affluent, first-world country that spends billions on privatised healthcare losing swaths of their middle-aged working class – could be traced back to one massive elephant in the room.
"It's a quandary of why this is happening when we spend so much on healthcare," Woolf said, adding: "But my betting money is on the economy."
Upticks in suicides, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related diseases "are all symptoms of people struggling in a poor economy who can't afford housing, find consistent jobs," and despair because of it, according to Woolf.
Drug overdose, alcohol abuse, and suicide – referred to by some as "deaths of despair" – appear to be the primary culprits [of the rising mortality rates].
This age group [25 -64] experienced a nearly four-fold increase in fatal drug overdoses between 1999 and 2017.
Suicide rates went up by nearly 40 percent for people between the ages of 25 and 64, and by 56 percent for people ages 55 to 64 during the same time frame. For Americans between the ages of 25 and 34, the rate of alcohol-related disease deaths spiked almost 160 percent, as well.
Obesity-related mortality rates among this age group also went up by 114 percent, and deaths linked to high blood increased by about 80 percent.
"Working-age Americans are more likely to die in the prime of their lives," Woolf said. Between 2010 and 2017, midlife US adults experienced a 6 percent total increase in mortality rate.
"We are seeing social determinants of health shaping well-being and outcomes," Howard Koh, a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of public health who was not involved in the study, told Business Insider.
"Forces like income inequality and unstable employment cause psychological distress and drive conditions by which diseases and deaths occur," he added.
In countries around the world, research has shown that people with lower incomes die sooner than their wealthier counterparts. A 2017 study linked low socioeconomic status to significant reductions in life expectancy.
But what makes the US unique, according to Woolf, is that "poor people in other countries live longer than poor people in our country".
[Read more here]
I talked about this before, in my piece Shit-Life Syndrome. The standard American diet (SAD) is undoubtedly one factor in falling life expectancy, but that doesn't explain suicide, now at the highest rate since the Great Depression, nor rising deaths from alcoholism. Rising inequality is killing people. It's time for a change.
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