Is the current US life expectancy rating at 47th in the world (and falling), salvageable?

21 comments

1. Absolutely, it’s an aberration by the opioid epidemic and leftovers of COVID. Our lifespan was increasing every year until the opioid epidemic started. It’s also inaccurate. The average lifespan for an American who never touches an opioid? It’s about 80. There’s not a lot of salvaging to be done unless you’re a drug user.

   How do we make it better? Expand healthcare coverage is about the best you can do. COVID happened and it’s hard to stop people from using drugs. Education would put a dent but otherwise I don’t think anyone knows or we would’ve done it by now.

2. I wonder what it would be without the fentanyl?

3. Getting government healthcare with regulated costs would be first step.

4. If I had magical powers?

   I’d remove all of the illegal fentanyl, cure the addicts of their fentanyl addictions, and have mental health resources available to all of them.

   The average life expectancy would go up almost instantly.

   The opioid epidemic is one of the big reasons that life expectancy has gone down in the US…. And with fentanyl having been added in the mix, well…. That shit is basically cyanide that gets you high.

   For practical solutions (if I didn’t have magic powers)- that’s a lot tougher.

   I could sit here and talk about “fighting the cartels!” And “more money to the border to stop the flow!!”…. But that just makes me sound like a politician.

   And we’ve been doing that and it doesn’t seem to work.

   So I have to beg off on the practical side… contrary to what politicians say I don’t think there is any easy solution.

5. I’m going to live forever so the US life expectancy rating is of little concern to me.

6. It would be to identify what is pulling it down and rectify it. The life expectancy is hardly universal. We have an opioid epidemic that is killing a ton of fairly young people. We have a few key problems which are drastically bringing down the life expectancy drastically in some communities.

   Australia is no different. Australian Aborigines live drastically shorter than non-aborigine Australians. In Northern Territory Aborigine men have a life expectancy that is 66-67. That would be among the absolute lowest anywhere you would find in the US with only places like McDowell County (that has an opioid overdose rate that is 10x the national average, severe poverty, and has seen a long term population collapse) will you get those sort of numbers.

7. Make GLP-1 agonist drugs free for anyone with a BMI over 25. Kind of like how everyone with chronic kidney disease requiring dialysis can get Medicare.

8. Make BMI your tax rate, down to and including 18.5.

9. Universal affordable healthcare – We have people running away from ambulances to avoid bill. People are not taking their medications or are taking less than the prescribed dose because they can’t afford them. People with serious health concerns don’t go to the doctor because they can’t afford it.

   I knew someone who’s 40 year old husband did not seek treatment for crushing chest pain. They were uninsured. His work offered extremely expensive bare bones insurance so they were not eligible for the government exchange. They earned to much for Medicaid but not enough to afford the employer offered plan. Her work brought in a benefits consult who apologized for not being able to help.

   Find a way to tax multinational corporations doing business here. Increase marginal tax rates on income over $500,000. Find a way for Warren Buffet to pay a higher tax rate than his secretary. Fund the IRS so they have the resources go after rich people.

10. This is a bizarre super-villain goal. My mission is to compete with foreign contries, to make sure that their people die off at a younger age than my own countrymen!? Well, okay.

    I would reform our agricultural subsidies, and reform our health care system.

    So most of what we die from is: heart disease (diet related), cancer (can’t be helped), diabetes (totally diet related), strokes (likely diet related, ’cause blood pressure)…. all the shit we die from is diet related.

    Why is our diet so bad in America? tldr: there are government policies that encourage businesses to sell junk food, and encourage farmers to grow the ingredients for junk food.

    Here’s a fact you shouldn’t trust me on, but should look up yourself: In Europe, a person spends over 20% of their paycheck on groceries. But in the U.S., a person only spends less than 10%. Why so different? Because in America, our government heavily subsidizes agriculture. (long story; Henry Kissinger’s idea; helps keep South America economically weak) But the *way* that we subsidize agriculture is like this “hands-off”, “do it through private interests” style. (Because, if we were “hands-on”, we would be commies, and to hell with that.) So, our government don’t handle it, they merely encourage businesses to handle it. But businesses will inevitablyhandle it in the most *profitable* way, not the most healthy way.

    So everyone ends up sick. Because everyone’s diet is garbage. So we go to the doctor. But oh, wait! We can’t afford the doctor. We need health insurance.

    Many Americans *do* have health insurance. And we think we get it from our employer, and in a sense we do. But *actually*, our employer gets a subsidy from the government, to provide that insurance for us. So…. if you think your boss is giving you health insurance, they’re not; they’re using tax dollars to 100% pay them back. (This is another thing where the government needs to say they have a strict “hands off” philosophy. They’re not paying to send workers to the doctor; they’re paying *employers* to promise that they’re paying to send their workers to the doctor.)

    Anyway,

    > How would it be financed?

    It wouldn’t even need to be financed! I’d just need to rework the U.S. budget. Simply give people healthcare, instead of reimbursing people’s employers to handle it. And stop subsidizing businesses to manufacture and distribute junk food.

11. I’d join the rest of the developed world in having a sensible healthcare system. Treat Substance Use Disorder as a health issue and not a criminal issue. Greatly improve education funding.

12. It’s caused by the extreme form of capitalism we unleashed in the 1980s and continuing to the present.

    Edit: we started falling behind before Covid and before the opioid problem. Longevity is associated with high income countries. Almost all the factors cited over the years as causing us to fall behind are associated with stress- obesity, drug addiction, smoking, etc. People economically stressed have poorer health and succumb to bad habits associated with economic stress. They receive poorer health care, access cheaper food. They have less spare time to work on balancing their lives. They expend more energies making sure they have enough money. The wealth gap is bad for longevity numbers

    How would we finance it? The same way we did last time- a solid middle class

13. I suspect the falling! life!! expectancy!!! is mostly because we’ve reached the upper limits of what is possible and maybe most humans really aren’t meant to live much more than 80 years.

14. In theory, yes. In practice: there’s too much money in healthcare and that money talks very loudly.

    We need better access to care for ALL citizens, which starts at the cost of medical school being evaluated/reduced/covered (Im not positive which would be best) so that we can have more general doctors, as many specialize in $$$ specialities to afford the student loans instead. If we don’t do this we end up with the problem of insane wait times for care which to be frank, we are already seeing the beginning of despite the garbage fire system we have now.

    Once we have that established, we go to a single payer health system.

    We also need to be doing more medical research with women, as they have historically been excluded due to pregnancy fear and thus have severely understudied outcomes and poorer health results.

    Finally, we start looking to tackle the opioid epidemic by finding & treating the root causes, often chronic pain or mental health issues. I suspect the prior steps will likely help somewhat with the issue, but this particular portion of the plan will be the most difficult as the root causes are likely to be as varied as the people.

    As much as people hate taxes, it would be cheaper for almost everyone on the single payer system compared to what they pay presently to health insurance.

15. As an Australian it will be almost impossible for you to get a realistic understanding of life in the US, never mind the complex solutions required to address such a complex issue.

16. Australia places 63rd in innovation out of 64 developed nations, according to World Economic Forum. How would you change this? (Curious American, 2nd in the world.)

17. Opioid epidemic aside, I’d like to see high fructose corn syrup banned.

18. The obvious answer is our drug problem especially with shit like fentanyl and weird synthetics floating around.

    The less obvious answer is that we simply measure the stat differently than most other countries because we actually count infants that die under one year of age in our statistics of life expectancy. The vast majority of child deaths occur in this range and large deviances at extreme ends do weird things to averages. Other countries are simply less honest about the statistics because they game the numbers.

    Americans also walk less than the average person due to our car culture, are more overweight, and have other bad habits that all contribute to worse health outcomes.

19. Extra judicial sentences for drug dealers, obviously.

20. One low-cost method would be to improve awareness of pharmaceutical treatments for alcoholism. They have existed for a little while now. But are being under-prescribed due to limited awareness even from doctors.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3860540/

    There’s other stuff obviously like reforming the food industry, improving policing to limit violent crime, improving mental health treatment to limit suicides, ensuring universal health care coverage etc. But it seems like improving the use of pharmaceutical drugs for alcoholism and obesity would be low-hanging fruit that doesn’t require deep structural change.

21. >and falling

    Well an open border will cause some skewed numbers.