Makes sense and is expected based on how things function in America right now.
Opioid prescriptions and abuse
Increased traffic deaths + road rage incidents (https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimates-first-quarter-2022)
Deaths of despair + suicides (Many sources and discussions about this)
Lack of access to basic health care (lack of access to abortion will contribute here soon)
Obesity and fast food (self-explanatory)
Alcoholism from being bored during the pandemic (https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/01/covid-related-drinking-linked-to-rise-in-liver-disease/)
(edit) and of course COVID-19 related deaths and illness
I mean there are just so many factors going against us, and either neglect or disagreement on how to solve these problems. On the left you have people who are suggesting that being obese is ok (it's not, it's a health problem, doesn't mean you need to be ashamed or be insulted though) and on the right, well, that speaks for itself.
Similar to global warming, though, the solutions for these problems are technocratic and unlikely to generate any sort of broad public support or acknowledgement in the sense that people vote for candidates based in something like advocating for decreasing traffic fatalities. So long as partisans continue to bicker and worship ridiculous ideological positions we won't have any pragmatic solutions or attempts to mitigate these problems because the technocrats can't function in an environment where ideological purity and populism are the currency instead of facts and solutions.
None of these will cause a downfall of America or anything, we're just going to be a bit more, eh, chaotic?
The biggest underlying issue is the decline of family units. No one talks about it but it’s true. You can’t function as a society when there is no immediate support system left in the form of family and loved ones. We are inherently a social creature.
Family unit decline is a symptom not the underlying cause, it's a small part of the matrix of issues, it's often invoked as a means of blaming something inherently unchangeable, undefinable and unregulateable as a diversion.
And everyone does talk about it, I hear about it 3 times a week and it's because it's a useful distraction and a wedge to force legislation of personal moral choice.
It's like saying all problems individuals are having are caused by the individual. Somehow society, culture, governance and macro economic forces have no effect.
If you think the breakdown of the family unit is the root cause, let me assure you, homeschool familes are facing the same issue in our current environment.
Of course if we want to embrace absurdist reductionism the REAL problem is the dysfunction of churches abandoning their societal role for political power in the 80s, family's DO break down and now we have no "generally apolitical" relational safety net outside of the workplace, so social dysfunction can promulgate with no positive feedback loop of increased social cohesion to stop it. We need religious, areligious and apolitical societies that will facilitate mingling of social classes and are focused on the social good.
From Pew Research (2010), the decline in marriage is offset by rise in new families:
The Resilience of Families. The decline of marriage has not knocked family life off its pedestal. Three-quarters of all adults (76%) say their family is the most important element of their life; 75% say they are “very satisfied” with their family life, and more than eight-in-ten say the family they live in now is as close as (45%) or closer than (40%) the family in which they grew up. However, on all of these questions, married adults give more positive responses than do unmarried adults.
The Definition of Family. By emphatic margins, the public does not see marriage as the only path to family formation. Fully 86% say a single parent and child constitute a family; nearly as many (80%) say an unmarried couple living together with a child is a family; and 63% say a gay or lesbian couple raising a child is a family. The presence of children clearly matters in these definitions. If a cohabiting couple has no children, a majority of the public says they are not a family. Marriage matters, too. If a childless couple is married, 88% consider them to be a family.
The Ties that Bind. In response to a question about whom they would assist with money or caregiving in a time of need, Americans express a greater sense of obligation toward relatives—including relatives by way of fractured marriages– than toward best friends. The ranking of relatives aligns in a predictable hierarchy. More survey respondents express an obligation to help out a parent (83% would feel very obligated) or grown child (77%) than say the same about a stepparent (55%) or a step or half sibling (43%). But when asked about one’s best friend, just 39% say they would feel a similar sense of obligation.
I think it's 'an issue' but not the major issue, except where it's 'acute'. A lot of couples are not getting married these days, which is 'something' but not like a disaster but in extremely impoverished/violeng ghetto areas you see well over 50% of kids not having any meaningful relationship with their Fathers. Now that is a 'primary' issue but it's also tied to incarceration, violence etc..
Definitely ultra violence (related to universal gun access), lack of healthcare, excessive inequality in some areas, obesity etc. are big factors.
I'm not sure if the most recent post-COVID data is hugely helpful because America did 'not very well' on that one despite having vaccines available. I mean, that's a whole other level of sad. But give it 3 years to see where the data sits without the 'COVID' blip.
At a glance this reads close to "families with no father figure". You probably didn't mean the likes or to induce knee jerk reactions, but would replace "family unit decline" as being an issue of concern with "there's little to no social/gov provided safety net" for folks who need it.
Family as we know it is a historical oddity. Before the industrial revolution the social networks were much broader and involved whole communities, or much more extended families than what we consider normal now. We can introduce other social groups that help people in need and provide support and are not based primarily on family ties. This is orthogonal to “family units”, which is more of a conservative dog whistle. There are not fewer families now than there used to be, it’s just that a family is not necessarily the stereotypical married heterosexual couple with their 6 children.
Cuba, one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere has a longer life expectancy than the US because they have universal healthcare. They also have a higher divorce rate than the US.
Straight people should get their act together. Y’all are so stuck on an image of family that has only existed for two generations at most, and it causes you to be lonely and unable to form relationships of meaningful strength outside that image. I feel sorry for straight people.
I'd say obesity of by far the worst out of those, since its so widespread and covid certainly didn't help there. That Americans are generally way more overweight than say Europeans is something I keep hearing for multiple decades and became a regular meme source, and I keep seeing it regularly.
I saw a lot of attempts for normalization of this in US media, ie Hollywood family/comedy movies painting it as something to be OK with, and not a disease that will slowly but surely ruin your life and kill you prematurely, all completely preventable. I wonder how much better US healthcare would be if obesity wasn't such an epidemic there, the costs for treating all those comorbidities that eventually come is staggering, all long term treatments.
HFCS must have lion share in this, as overall processed cheap junk food. We don't have it all figured out here in Europe, but at least our approach to food, its quality and quantity is way better here.
The average american is just plain unhealthy. Terrible diet, little daily activity. It's in the stats, which people ignore. You just plain see it with your own eyes as well. It's a genuine problem, not a lifestyle choice.
I spent a month in Asia, when I was planning the trip I was a little worried about eating out all the time and my health and weight gain. I actually ended up losing weight despite eating every meal in a restaurant.
Everything was so much less sweet, less sugar in everything. Even cookies weren't that sweet
> I saw a lot of attempts for normalization of this in US media, ie Hollywood family/comedy movies painting it as something to be OK with, and not a disease that will slowly but surely ruin your life and kill you prematurely, all completely preventable.
The thing is, looking at OECD ranking I am sitting in country with much lower obesity then USA.
The obesity stigma here is much lower then in USA and was always lower. The stereotype of fat people was that they are friendly and easier to get along with.
Terrible diets lead to obesity and insulin resistance. Doctors do the blood glucose test and if the patient does not figure out eating and nutrition on their own, the Doctors often write prescription for insulin to supposedly control blood glucose. This has the obvious effect of accelerating insulin resistance, though the blood glucose numbers do look better for a while.
> That Americans are generally way more overweight than say Europeans
Indeed, and this is why it's difficult to discuss universal health care with European friends and coworkers.
It's one thing to subsidize basic humanity, some poor soul who got the wrong DNA sequence shattered at the wrong time by the wrong cosmic ray, or who tripped on a sidewalk and wrecked their pelvis. Absolutely laudable goal.
It's another thing entirely to subsidize the stars of My 600lb Life.
And inbefore the inevitable downvotes for being "heartless", I am a former fatass with an abiding hatred for my former self. Fat people largely bring their health problems on themselves. This is a fact. Source: me.
How are you defining worst? Genuinely asking, because as far as I know opioid contributes far more to the falling in life expectancy because it kills people from an early age. Even a fat person's body can keep going into their 50s and 60s.
These health insurances you get in the US are horrible because you can easily pay hundreds of dollars if you go to the doctor depending on your plan. There’s a minimum you need to spend from your own pocket before the insurance starts covering you. For this reason many (most?) people who are insured still do not visit their doctor.
> the number of Americans with health insurance is at a historic high, Biden bragged about it on Twitter last week
I have "good" insurance through my employer. Over the summer I had appendicitis. The cost of the surgery and hospital stay after insurance would have bankrupted my brother and put any of my cousins in substantive medical debt. It would have been nearly a fifth of my retired mother's net worth.
Having insurance is great because it makes lots of care attainable, but it's a vast overstatement to say that having it gives you access to basic care. A majority of Americans have less than $1000 in savings—that's not even an ambulance ride.
I was under the impression that doctors were getting sheepish about giving such advice in the US. Patients don't like to hear it.
And overweight patients require more and more expensive treatments over the course of their lives, creating a perverse incentive in a for-profit healthcare system.
There's a lot of speculation in this thread, but the article specifically identifies the causes:
> While the pandemic has driven most of the decline in life expectancy, a rise in accidental deaths and drug overdoses also contributed, as did deaths from heart disease, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis, the new report found.
Unless they're referring to a different report than the one they linked to [1], the report did not say this. They did not offer anything in the way of explanations besides hand-waving proposals that, in some cases, were contradicted by their own data.
They proposed the greater loss in minority life expectancy as being driven by "systemic racism as well as inadequacies in the US handling of the pandemic." What that's supposed to mean was never stated. The next sentence reflected upon a higher rate of non-minority deaths the following year which the paper claimed "likely has multiple explanations." None of those possible explanations were offered.
They concluded with offering an estimated life expectancy in America of 76.44 for 2021. The final official numbers from the UN numbers ended up with 77.2.
Wiki posted the 2022 report on life expectancy from the UN [1]. US life expectancy has now fallen to 70th in the world. The countries ahead of us now are including places such as impoverished micronations. Any explanation for this drop, needs to be able to explain not only the deaths but why the extreme relative impact.
COVID alone could account for that. Differences in rankings from that article's 2019 UN and 2021 UN are almost entirely correlated with COVID death rates per 100k[0] (death rates in parens):
The US is a large country with a very high variance of outcomes. It effectively "contains" impoverished micronations, which are mentioned in the article, such as Native Americans.
The graph is quite shocking to me. Looks like the series was coasting around a constant 76.5-ish until 2019, where it completely nosedived twice in a row. Is this due to COVID?
Just to clarify for other people who were confused, life expectancy increased until 2019 inclusive, then nosedived. So Covid (or higher-order effects of Covid and the response) must be responsible.
Hard to say. What we know for sure is that it 100% does NOT have ANYTHING to do with the safe and effective vaccines. I can’t believe people would even think that!
I found it especially confusing how certain numbers were presented as the 2019-2021 delta and others the 2020-2021 delta without any way of seeing all the data together. Thanks for linking to the original source as when I looked for it last night I found it difficult to find.
For context: life expectancy declined for the first time in decades in 2014 (from an all time high of 78.84 years, to 78.69 years), plateaued at 78.54 until 2019 (when it increased to 78.79 years), and then fell off a cliff from 2020 onwards, to 77.28 years.
> Life expectancy for women in the United States dropped about 10 months, from just under 80 years in 2020 to slightly more than 79 in 2021. Life expectancy for men dropped a full year, from about 74 years to 73.
We've known that there's a gap in life expectancy between men and women for awhile now. But the surprising thing is that the gap is increasing; you might expect that life expectancy would drop a certain percentage for all groups, leading to the ones with the highest life expectancy getting the largest drop.
I dont think that is reasonable expectation. Some issues affect men more - covid, substance abuse, suicide and general violence belonging in that category.
That's just restating the issue: you're just saying "premature death affects men more." The question is why. It's not some natural state of affairs but something created by social and political choices.
For COVID, for example, the risk ratio for men compared to women is larger than the risk ratio for e.g. black people compared to white people. But public health authorities in the US prioritized access to vaccines to racial minorities (who indeed had higher age-adjusted mortality rates than white people), while not doing the same for men. This is an ideological choice, driven by the idea that bad things that happen to men aren't worthy of social concern.
More broadly, the gendered death statistics are indicative of systemic inequalities.
The death of Gorbachev has reminded me that one effect of the end of the USSR was a catastrophic drop in the life expectancy of Russian men, by something like 20 years. It's quite a good "marker" for decline.
> "Although the U.S. health care system is among the best in the world, Americans suffer from what experts have called “the U.S. health disadvantage,” an amalgam of influences that erode well-being, Dr. Woolf said."
That's an impressive piece of equivocation. So good that it has a special disadvantage?
We're fatter than our peers [0], we drive more (and therefore crash more often) [1], we're more violent [2], and we abuse drugs at much higher rates [3]. Those are our "special disadvantages."
The point being made, I think, is that it isn't the health care system at fault in these disadvantages, but rather some external factors. Obesity, for example, is particularly high in the US, and leads to reduce lifespan.
Readit News
Similar to global warming, though, the solutions for these problems are technocratic and unlikely to generate any sort of broad public support or acknowledgement in the sense that people vote for candidates based in something like advocating for decreasing traffic fatalities. So long as partisans continue to bicker and worship ridiculous ideological positions we won't have any pragmatic solutions or attempts to mitigate these problems because the technocrats can't function in an environment where ideological purity and populism are the currency instead of facts and solutions.
None of these will cause a downfall of America or anything, we're just going to be a bit more, eh, chaotic?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
https://statisticalatlas.com/United-States/Household-Types
And everyone does talk about it, I hear about it 3 times a week and it's because it's a useful distraction and a wedge to force legislation of personal moral choice.
It's like saying all problems individuals are having are caused by the individual. Somehow society, culture, governance and macro economic forces have no effect.
If you think the breakdown of the family unit is the root cause, let me assure you, homeschool familes are facing the same issue in our current environment.
Of course if we want to embrace absurdist reductionism the REAL problem is the dysfunction of churches abandoning their societal role for political power in the 80s, family's DO break down and now we have no "generally apolitical" relational safety net outside of the workplace, so social dysfunction can promulgate with no positive feedback loop of increased social cohesion to stop it. We need religious, areligious and apolitical societies that will facilitate mingling of social classes and are focused on the social good.
The Resilience of Families. The decline of marriage has not knocked family life off its pedestal. Three-quarters of all adults (76%) say their family is the most important element of their life; 75% say they are “very satisfied” with their family life, and more than eight-in-ten say the family they live in now is as close as (45%) or closer than (40%) the family in which they grew up. However, on all of these questions, married adults give more positive responses than do unmarried adults.
The Definition of Family. By emphatic margins, the public does not see marriage as the only path to family formation. Fully 86% say a single parent and child constitute a family; nearly as many (80%) say an unmarried couple living together with a child is a family; and 63% say a gay or lesbian couple raising a child is a family. The presence of children clearly matters in these definitions. If a cohabiting couple has no children, a majority of the public says they are not a family. Marriage matters, too. If a childless couple is married, 88% consider them to be a family.
The Ties that Bind. In response to a question about whom they would assist with money or caregiving in a time of need, Americans express a greater sense of obligation toward relatives—including relatives by way of fractured marriages– than toward best friends. The ranking of relatives aligns in a predictable hierarchy. More survey respondents express an obligation to help out a parent (83% would feel very obligated) or grown child (77%) than say the same about a stepparent (55%) or a step or half sibling (43%). But when asked about one’s best friend, just 39% say they would feel a similar sense of obligation.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2010/11/18/the-dec...
Definitely ultra violence (related to universal gun access), lack of healthcare, excessive inequality in some areas, obesity etc. are big factors.
I'm not sure if the most recent post-COVID data is hugely helpful because America did 'not very well' on that one despite having vaccines available. I mean, that's a whole other level of sad. But give it 3 years to see where the data sits without the 'COVID' blip.
Deleted Comment
https://www.axios.com/2022/08/31/covid-us-life-expectancy
I saw a lot of attempts for normalization of this in US media, ie Hollywood family/comedy movies painting it as something to be OK with, and not a disease that will slowly but surely ruin your life and kill you prematurely, all completely preventable. I wonder how much better US healthcare would be if obesity wasn't such an epidemic there, the costs for treating all those comorbidities that eventually come is staggering, all long term treatments.
HFCS must have lion share in this, as overall processed cheap junk food. We don't have it all figured out here in Europe, but at least our approach to food, its quality and quantity is way better here.
Everything was so much less sweet, less sugar in everything. Even cookies weren't that sweet
The thing is, looking at OECD ranking I am sitting in country with much lower obesity then USA.
The obesity stigma here is much lower then in USA and was always lower. The stereotype of fat people was that they are friendly and easier to get along with.
Indeed, and this is why it's difficult to discuss universal health care with European friends and coworkers.
It's one thing to subsidize basic humanity, some poor soul who got the wrong DNA sequence shattered at the wrong time by the wrong cosmic ray, or who tripped on a sidewalk and wrecked their pelvis. Absolutely laudable goal.
It's another thing entirely to subsidize the stars of My 600lb Life.
And inbefore the inevitable downvotes for being "heartless", I am a former fatass with an abiding hatred for my former self. Fat people largely bring their health problems on themselves. This is a fact. Source: me.
the number of Americans with health insurance is at a historic high, Biden bragged about it on Twitter last week
it doesn't matter if you go to the doctor...if you don't take the doctor's advice and eat better + exercise...
I have "good" insurance through my employer. Over the summer I had appendicitis. The cost of the surgery and hospital stay after insurance would have bankrupted my brother and put any of my cousins in substantive medical debt. It would have been nearly a fifth of my retired mother's net worth.
Having insurance is great because it makes lots of care attainable, but it's a vast overstatement to say that having it gives you access to basic care. A majority of Americans have less than $1000 in savings—that's not even an ambulance ride.
I was under the impression that doctors were getting sheepish about giving such advice in the US. Patients don't like to hear it.
And overweight patients require more and more expensive treatments over the course of their lives, creating a perverse incentive in a for-profit healthcare system.
Dead Comment
> While the pandemic has driven most of the decline in life expectancy, a rise in accidental deaths and drug overdoses also contributed, as did deaths from heart disease, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis, the new report found.
They proposed the greater loss in minority life expectancy as being driven by "systemic racism as well as inadequacies in the US handling of the pandemic." What that's supposed to mean was never stated. The next sentence reflected upon a higher rate of non-minority deaths the following year which the paper claimed "likely has multiple explanations." None of those possible explanations were offered.
They concluded with offering an estimated life expectancy in America of 76.44 for 2021. The final official numbers from the UN numbers ended up with 77.2.
[1] - https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.04.05.22273393v...
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr023.pdf
The paragraph I quoted is drawing from the chart on page 5.
Most (all?) proposed explanations fail to do so.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
Peru (654) -- #66 -> #138
Bulgaria (541) -- #81 -> #144
Bosnia (489) -- #52 -> #90
... Skipping a few for brevity
Brazil (321) -- #55 -> #127
USA (317) -- #44 -> #70
Chile (316) -- #33 -> #55
Greece (312) -- #20 -> #46
Italy (290) -- #3 -> #13
Russia (257) -- #103 -> #176
Mexico (257) -- #85 -> #169
Spain (240) -- #6 -> #11
France (237) -- #12 -> #18
[0] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
Idk why they decided to write out every single number when a chart or graph would have been easier to read.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-at-birth-...
We've known that there's a gap in life expectancy between men and women for awhile now. But the surprising thing is that the gap is increasing; you might expect that life expectancy would drop a certain percentage for all groups, leading to the ones with the highest life expectancy getting the largest drop.
Perhaps an equity lens is merited here.
For COVID, for example, the risk ratio for men compared to women is larger than the risk ratio for e.g. black people compared to white people. But public health authorities in the US prioritized access to vaccines to racial minorities (who indeed had higher age-adjusted mortality rates than white people), while not doing the same for men. This is an ideological choice, driven by the idea that bad things that happen to men aren't worthy of social concern.
More broadly, the gendered death statistics are indicative of systemic inequalities.
> "Although the U.S. health care system is among the best in the world, Americans suffer from what experts have called “the U.S. health disadvantage,” an amalgam of influences that erode well-being, Dr. Woolf said."
That's an impressive piece of equivocation. So good that it has a special disadvantage?
[0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DpNdUMeXUAAEHA4.jpg:large
[1] https://streets.mn/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/annual-VMT-dri...
[2] https://i.insider.com/55831cda69bedde87600549e?width=700&for...
[3] https://www.issup.net/knowledge-share/publications/2016-09/u...
Seems about right.