13 ms·

U.S. Life Expectancy Falls Again in ‘Historic’ Setback

90 points by aaraujo002 4y ago

symlinkk 4y ago
Everything is getting worse.
newacct0 4y ago
- guardiangod 4y ago
  >It's the opiod crisis That's an bold statement to make. Canada is also experiencing a historic opiod crisis right now, but their life expectancy is dropping no near as fast as US. Something else is going on. EDIT: I don't think the parent post should be flagged. The opioid crisis is real and has a noticeable effect on life expectancy. It's just not the whole story, that's all.
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    But is Canada doing better at mitigating the damage from the opioid crisis? For example safe injection sites presumably lower the fatality rate of drug addiction quite significantly.
    - guardiangod 4y ago
      As a Canadian I can tell you, no. This year British Columbia on average has 5 deaths per day from fentanyl OD, rising from 3/day from just 2 years ago. The majority of deaths are normal people who used contaminated recreational drugs in their home, as oppose to street junkies that are quickly revived by ambulances.
      - bryanlarsen 4y ago
        So BC is doing a good job of saving the lives of street junkies? That sounds like successful mitigation to me.
        guardiangod 4y ago
        In an ironic way, yes. People who quietly OD in their house die while junkies are quickly noticed by their street pals and revived (and would often fight the paramedic for breaking their high.) (Apparently it's now 6 deaths/day, up from 5/day in 2021).
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    I suspect the (grand)parent is flagged because of completely bogus numbers.
- Balero 4y ago
  > 75% drug addiction rate Are you saying that 3 out of 4 people in the US are addicted to one drug or another, or am I misunderstanding. > there was 70%+ opioid prescription rate This I can completely believe. I broke a bone, and when the doctor was asking how much pain I was in out of 10. I said 0, when I don't move it. They still prescribed me opioids. I asked if they expected the pain to increase, and they said they expected it to actually get less painful to move overtime if anything, and if it started hurting to get seen by another doctor. When asked about the painkillers then the answer was "Just in case".
  - dcchambers 4y ago
    That does seem way too high, unless they're including caffeine and alcohol, in which case I guess I could believe it.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      I would add sugar too.
      - kelseyfrog 4y ago
        Let's throw in "high on life" just to make sure.
        lotsofpulp 4y ago
        In a discussion of life expectancy, excess carbohydrate consumption in a nation with 75% overweight/obese population seems pretty relevant. Surely, sugar is the single biggest source of excess carbohydrate consumption. And the way people thirst for their sweet treats and drinks, it certainly looks like addiction. Not that it removes any culpability of other excess carb consumption like alcohol and breads.
      - dcchambers 4y ago
        While I agree sugar addiction is a serious issue the USA (and much of the world) faces, caffeine and alcohol are both technically drugs :)
- TheBigSalad 4y ago
  Not the global pandemic?
  - varelse 4y ago
  - godshatter 4y ago
    A disease that has taken the lives of over 1,000,000 people in the US, most of them elderly? I doubt it had an effect on the numbers.
- neogodless 4y ago
  https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/rxrate-maps/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/rxrate-maps/index.html This would indicate that after a peak in 2012 of 81.3 prescriptions for every 100 people, it has decreased to 43.3 in 2020.
  - HPsquared 4y ago
    That doesn't necessarily mean 81.3 people out of 100 have prescriptions, if people can have more than one prescription per year. I'd assume the affected people probably get something like monthly prescriptions? (not sure if that's how it works)
- lolinder 4y ago
  > There is a 75% drug addiction rate in the United States currently This number doesn't pass the sniff test unless you're including caffeine dependency. In 2015 NIH reported 10% had ever had a substance abuse problem: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/10-percent-us-adults-have-drug-use-disorder-some-point-their-lives https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/10-percent-us-...
  - codyb 4y ago
    75%! Can you imagine the party on the streets, holy moly!
- morsch 4y ago
  Giving the prescription rate as a percentage confused me (though it seems commonly done). What's meant is the number of prescriptions per 100 persons, per year. I assume a rate of 70 could mean 70 persons received one prescription each, or one person received 70 prescriptions? https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/rxrate-maps/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/rxrate-maps/index.html
bearjaws 4y ago
fallingfrog 4y ago
Due to excess deaths from COVID, no doubt. Losing a few young people can reduce overall life expectancy by quite a bit.
- VyseofArcadia 4y ago
  Right. Over a million excess deaths in a short time will do that, and a non-negligible number were not elderly.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  US life expectancy was falling well before COVID in spite of spending much more in PPP terms than any other country in the world on healthcare. The country seems to prefer to be fleeced than to consider other options that might be labeled as socialism.
  - ilikehurdles 4y ago
    Slight decline vs a nosedive during the pandemic.
  - fallingfrog 4y ago
    Everything you just said is true, but it could also be simultaneously true that most of the drop was due to covid. The two are related in fact- structuring your whole health care system to maximize profit no matter what the side effects might be makes it brittle in the face of a pandemic. Basically I'm saying that my statement, and your statement, are not contradictory but rather two sides of the same coin.
- PeterStuer 4y ago
  There is also worldwide an as yet unexplained 10% rise in non-covid surpluss mortality.
  - VyseofArcadia 4y ago
    I suspect a decent chunk of that is unreported/deliberately obfuscated covid deaths.
TrueGeek 4y ago
https://archive.ph/7jS9t https://archive.ph/7jS9t
Out_of_Characte 4y ago
You simply can't fix systemic health issues with a pill, shot or a multivitamin. obesity correlates with higher covid mortality and this article mentions quite clearly that alaskan life expectancy decreased despite succesfull vaccinations. Worse yet, obesity seems to be increasing rather than decreasing so whatever any politician, healthcare service or advocacy group has done the past 20 years, the USA is still not closer to a solution to the lowering life expectancy. Covid might be over but there will always be a next crisis.
- anjbe 4y ago
  The US obesity rate is over 40%! https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html
- bredren 4y ago
  > Covid might be over but… How is it over?
  - anon291 4y ago
    We all got it and realized it's a cold?
    - thinkcontext 4y ago
      No. Over 4M people in the US are out of the workforce because of long Covid. The death rate from Covid this year is on pace to be a multiple of average flu deaths.
      - anon291 4y ago
        Sure, and over time this will lessen as it has for almost all novel diseases, whether it be Covid, the new flu variant, or smallpox
- incomingpain 4y ago
  >You simply can't fix systemic health issues with a pill, shot or a multivitamin. I feel like this is the biggest impediment to universal healthcare in the usa. When much of the developed world implemented it, around late 1960s. You had fully recovered from debt of WW2, working economies producing lots and the cost of healthcare was low. Today in universal healthcare systems you are seeing much if not all of them reducing. For example, https://ca.news.yahoo.com/5-changes-to-ohip-now-in-effect-205354642.html https://ca.news.yahoo.com/5-changes-to-ohip-now-in-effect-20... It goes without saying as well that most shots, pills, or multivitamins are not covered at all. How about the myriad of problems that simply aren't solveable. >obesity correlates with higher covid mortality and this article mentions quite clearly that alaskan life expectancy decreased despite succesfull vaccinations. With obesity comes diabetes and uncurable disease. The medicine for which is not covered in most countries and not to mention has gotten very expensive. https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/reports-publications/health-promotion-chronic-disease-prevention-canada-research-policy-practice/vol-37-no-2-2017/cost-diabetes-canada-over-10-years-applying-attributable-health-care-costs-diabetes-incidence-prediction-model.html https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/reports-publ... https://www.diabetes.co.uk/diet-for-type2-diabetes.html https://www.diabetes.co.uk/diet-for-type2-diabetes.html If you went to a grocery store or restaurant the probability that it's full of sugar/carbs is extremely high. If suddenly tomorrow everyone switches off sugar/carbs, we would have immense food shortages. So we can't really encourage people to switch off carbs. >Worse yet, obesity seems to be increasing rather than decreasing so whatever any politician, healthcare service or advocacy group has done the past 20 years, the USA is still not closer to a solution to the lowering life expectancy. Covid might be over but there will always be a next crisis. Don't say all/any. https://globalfoodresearchprogram.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/SugaryDrink_tax_maps_2020_August_REV.pdf https://globalfoodresearchprogram.org/wp-content/uploads/202... Newfoundland's very popular liberal government implemented a sugar tax recently. I think it's a great idea and those who do it first will benefit in the long run. Flipside, I don't think government should be allowed to do anything with food. No restricting, no taxing, your extent is only in the 'everyone agrees with' category. Food inspectors for example? We can all agree that's important.
ericmay 4y ago
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?
- mercy_dude 4y ago
  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.
  - bparsons 4y ago
    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.
sct202 4y ago
There are graphs from the CDC in this PDF for the data that NYT is reporting: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr023.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr023.pdf Idk why they decided to write out every single number when a chart or graph would have been easier to read.
- quenix 4y ago
  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?
  - colpabar 4y ago
    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!
    - cjbgkagh 4y ago
      I got pericarditis after the booster, it felt like it was going to turn into a heart attack at any moment. I’m fanatical about my health so I could easily imagine others who are less careful getting a heart attack from the vaccine. And due to the anti-vax stigma I’m sure it’s under reported. But I’m assuming covid dominates the deaths.
    - NewJazz 4y ago
      Wouldn't Israel, the most highly vaccinated nation on the planet, see a similar effect? Or other highly vaccinated groups?
      - jerlam 4y ago
        Israel isn't the most vaccinated nation on the planet; it was merely the one of the first to have access to vaccine doses. They're basically on par with the United States now: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?facet=none&Metric=People+fully+vaccinated&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=USA~ITA~CAN~DEU~GBR~FRA~JPN~ISR~IND https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
meremortals 4y ago
Balaji says [0] (on Jackson, Mississippi's lack of running water) > There is no first world and third world anymore. > There is the ascending world, and then there is the descending world. > And this is the descending world. [1] > A similar phenomenon began right before the fall of the Soviet Union. Life expectancy for men fell from a high of 65 years in 1987 to a low of 57 years in 1994 [0](https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1564853661351628802 https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1564853661351628802) [1](https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1564859125829230592?t=fYcEZnWHMVGyuU31zUSmHQ&s=19 https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1564859125829230592?t=fYc...)
- simonebrunozzi 4y ago
  Remember, correlation <> causation [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau...
- incomingpain 4y ago
  Is there an expectation for something similar for the USA? Several more years of drop?
  - meremortals 4y ago
    That's how I interpret his statements, at least. He goes into more detail in his book The Network State, but essentially says America is descending and the future will be the Anarchistic West vs Communist China. He advocates exiting most systems into a "cloud country" which would ultimately manifest in the real world (aggregate online over similar values, purchase physical land, etc)
    - incomingpain 4y ago
      >That's how I interpret his statements, at least. He goes into more detail in his book The Network State, but essentially says America is descending and the future will be the Anarchistic West vs Communist China. He advocates exiting most systems into a "cloud country" which would ultimately manifest in the real world (aggregate online over similar values, purchase physical land, etc) I'm curious if he is expecting an anarcho-capitalism type system or he's predicting wildwest/dystopian. I feel like that's one of the big political divides. Why is China dominant and being made the boogey man in the USA? They opened free trade zones on their coast. They beat the USA at their own game who contemporarily are increasing taxes. You have everyone piling into Africa to bring them low tax capitalism especially China. They see their peasant war coming because of the ultra wealthy coast and impoverished west. Africa is about to become the next china with ultra cheap labour. China loses those contracts and must rush to replace them. For the USA to beat China, anarcho-capitalism is the likely option. That's the #1 scary unspoken thing about Trump. He represents exactly this. I am intrigued about the cloud country. It almost feels like Estonia might be that place? Or perhaps their attempt?
MontyCarloHall 4y ago
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. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-at-birth-total-years?time=2010..2020&country=~USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-at-birth-...
lolinder 4y ago
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.
- curiousllama 4y ago
  What gets lumped in with accidental deaths? COVID, Opioid Crisis, and Obesity make sense to me
  - CameronNemo 4y ago
    Traffic fatalities.
- somenameforme 4y ago
  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. [1] - https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.04.05.22273393v4.full-text https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.04.05.22273393v...
  - lolinder 4y ago
    Your link is the second in the article. This is the link the article provides in the second paragraph, the one they refer to as "the new report": https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr023.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr023.pdf The paragraph I quoted is drawing from the chart on page 5.
shadowgovt 4y ago
I'm surprised that this news is surprising. A pandemic hit and killed millions of people. It had a disproportionately high impact on the elderly, which will have the effect of "chopping the tail" off a Poisson distribution and dragging the mean down as a result. The past several years of data should almost certainly be considered an outlier that will stand out on a long-term trend now that COVID has vaccines.
rocket_surgeron 4y ago
Decades of high obesity colliding with years of an addiction crisis during a pandemic when the medical system is extremely stressed? Seems about right.
gameshot911 4y ago
This article would have really benefited from an easily-creatsd line chart trending life expectancy over time. It would have given a lot of context to the drop. I was surprised at the oversight by both the NYT journalists and editors.
scarmig 4y ago
> 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. Perhaps an equity lens is merited here.
- watwut 4y ago
  I dont think that is reasonable expectation. Some issues affect men more - covid, substance abuse, suicide and general violence belonging in that category.
  - scarmig 4y ago
    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.
    - watwut 4y ago
      You said that "But the surprising thing is that the gap is increasing;" It is not surprising at all, due to excess mortality being in areas that are traditionally more "manly" reasons to die of + covid.
      - scarmig 4y ago
somenameforme 4y ago
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. Most (all?) proposed explanations fail to do so. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
- lolinder 4y ago
  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): 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 https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
- pjc50 4y ago
  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.
00s_enthusiast 4y ago
[flagged]
pjc50 4y ago
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?
- syrrim 4y ago
  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.
- dionidium 4y ago
  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." [0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DpNdUMeXUAAEHA4.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DpNdUMeXUAAEHA4.jpg:large [1] https://streets.mn/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/annual-VMT-driving-chart-international.png https://streets.mn/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/annual-VMT-dri... [2] https://i.insider.com/55831cda69bedde87600549e?width=700&format=jpeg&auto=webp https://i.insider.com/55831cda69bedde87600549e?width=700&for... [3] https://www.issup.net/knowledge-share/publications/2016-09/usa-and-europe-drug-use-compared https://www.issup.net/knowledge-share/publications/2016-09/u...
cjbgkagh 4y ago
I wonder how much further decline is already baked in. People actually dying is a lagging indicator. It’ll be interesting to see the predicted life expectancy for 40 years.

90 points by aaraujo002 4y ago

symlinkk 4y ago

Everything is getting worse.

newacct0 4y ago

guardiangod 4y ago
>It's the opiod crisis That's an bold statement to make. Canada is also experiencing a historic opiod crisis right now, but their life expectancy is dropping no near as fast as US. Something else is going on. EDIT: I don't think the parent post should be flagged. The opioid crisis is real and has a noticeable effect on life expectancy. It's just not the whole story, that's all.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  But is Canada doing better at mitigating the damage from the opioid crisis? For example safe injection sites presumably lower the fatality rate of drug addiction quite significantly.
  - guardiangod 4y ago
    As a Canadian I can tell you, no. This year British Columbia on average has 5 deaths per day from fentanyl OD, rising from 3/day from just 2 years ago. The majority of deaths are normal people who used contaminated recreational drugs in their home, as oppose to street junkies that are quickly revived by ambulances.
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
      So BC is doing a good job of saving the lives of street junkies? That sounds like successful mitigation to me.
      - guardiangod 4y ago
        In an ironic way, yes. People who quietly OD in their house die while junkies are quickly noticed by their street pals and revived (and would often fight the paramedic for breaking their high.) (Apparently it's now 6 deaths/day, up from 5/day in 2021).
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  I suspect the (grand)parent is flagged because of completely bogus numbers.
Balero 4y ago
> 75% drug addiction rate Are you saying that 3 out of 4 people in the US are addicted to one drug or another, or am I misunderstanding. > there was 70%+ opioid prescription rate This I can completely believe. I broke a bone, and when the doctor was asking how much pain I was in out of 10. I said 0, when I don't move it. They still prescribed me opioids. I asked if they expected the pain to increase, and they said they expected it to actually get less painful to move overtime if anything, and if it started hurting to get seen by another doctor. When asked about the painkillers then the answer was "Just in case".
- dcchambers 4y ago
  That does seem way too high, unless they're including caffeine and alcohol, in which case I guess I could believe it.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    I would add sugar too.
    - kelseyfrog 4y ago
      Let's throw in "high on life" just to make sure.
      - lotsofpulp 4y ago
        In a discussion of life expectancy, excess carbohydrate consumption in a nation with 75% overweight/obese population seems pretty relevant. Surely, sugar is the single biggest source of excess carbohydrate consumption. And the way people thirst for their sweet treats and drinks, it certainly looks like addiction. Not that it removes any culpability of other excess carb consumption like alcohol and breads.
    - dcchambers 4y ago
      While I agree sugar addiction is a serious issue the USA (and much of the world) faces, caffeine and alcohol are both technically drugs :)
TheBigSalad 4y ago
Not the global pandemic?
- varelse 4y ago
- godshatter 4y ago
  A disease that has taken the lives of over 1,000,000 people in the US, most of them elderly? I doubt it had an effect on the numbers.
neogodless 4y ago
https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/rxrate-maps/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/rxrate-maps/index.html This would indicate that after a peak in 2012 of 81.3 prescriptions for every 100 people, it has decreased to 43.3 in 2020.
- HPsquared 4y ago
  That doesn't necessarily mean 81.3 people out of 100 have prescriptions, if people can have more than one prescription per year. I'd assume the affected people probably get something like monthly prescriptions? (not sure if that's how it works)
lolinder 4y ago
> There is a 75% drug addiction rate in the United States currently This number doesn't pass the sniff test unless you're including caffeine dependency. In 2015 NIH reported 10% had ever had a substance abuse problem: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/10-percent-us-adults-have-drug-use-disorder-some-point-their-lives https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/10-percent-us-...
- codyb 4y ago
  75%! Can you imagine the party on the streets, holy moly!
morsch 4y ago
Giving the prescription rate as a percentage confused me (though it seems commonly done). What's meant is the number of prescriptions per 100 persons, per year. I assume a rate of 70 could mean 70 persons received one prescription each, or one person received 70 prescriptions? https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/rxrate-maps/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/rxrate-maps/index.html

bearjaws 4y ago

fallingfrog 4y ago

Due to excess deaths from COVID, no doubt. Losing a few young people can reduce overall life expectancy by quite a bit.

VyseofArcadia 4y ago
Right. Over a million excess deaths in a short time will do that, and a non-negligible number were not elderly.
hotpotamus 4y ago
US life expectancy was falling well before COVID in spite of spending much more in PPP terms than any other country in the world on healthcare. The country seems to prefer to be fleeced than to consider other options that might be labeled as socialism.
- ilikehurdles 4y ago
  Slight decline vs a nosedive during the pandemic.
- fallingfrog 4y ago
  Everything you just said is true, but it could also be simultaneously true that most of the drop was due to covid. The two are related in fact- structuring your whole health care system to maximize profit no matter what the side effects might be makes it brittle in the face of a pandemic. Basically I'm saying that my statement, and your statement, are not contradictory but rather two sides of the same coin.
PeterStuer 4y ago
There is also worldwide an as yet unexplained 10% rise in non-covid surpluss mortality.
- VyseofArcadia 4y ago
  I suspect a decent chunk of that is unreported/deliberately obfuscated covid deaths.

TrueGeek 4y ago

https://archive.ph/7jS9t https://archive.ph/7jS9t

Out_of_Characte 4y ago

You simply can't fix systemic health issues with a pill, shot or a multivitamin. obesity correlates with higher covid mortality and this article mentions quite clearly that alaskan life expectancy decreased despite succesfull vaccinations. Worse yet, obesity seems to be increasing rather than decreasing so whatever any politician, healthcare service or advocacy group has done the past 20 years, the USA is still not closer to a solution to the lowering life expectancy. Covid might be over but there will always be a next crisis.

anjbe 4y ago
The US obesity rate is over 40%! https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html
bredren 4y ago
> Covid might be over but… How is it over?
- anon291 4y ago
  We all got it and realized it's a cold?
  - thinkcontext 4y ago
    No. Over 4M people in the US are out of the workforce because of long Covid. The death rate from Covid this year is on pace to be a multiple of average flu deaths.
    - anon291 4y ago
      Sure, and over time this will lessen as it has for almost all novel diseases, whether it be Covid, the new flu variant, or smallpox
incomingpain 4y ago
>You simply can't fix systemic health issues with a pill, shot or a multivitamin. I feel like this is the biggest impediment to universal healthcare in the usa. When much of the developed world implemented it, around late 1960s. You had fully recovered from debt of WW2, working economies producing lots and the cost of healthcare was low. Today in universal healthcare systems you are seeing much if not all of them reducing. For example, https://ca.news.yahoo.com/5-changes-to-ohip-now-in-effect-205354642.html https://ca.news.yahoo.com/5-changes-to-ohip-now-in-effect-20... It goes without saying as well that most shots, pills, or multivitamins are not covered at all. How about the myriad of problems that simply aren't solveable. >obesity correlates with higher covid mortality and this article mentions quite clearly that alaskan life expectancy decreased despite succesfull vaccinations. With obesity comes diabetes and uncurable disease. The medicine for which is not covered in most countries and not to mention has gotten very expensive. https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/reports-publications/health-promotion-chronic-disease-prevention-canada-research-policy-practice/vol-37-no-2-2017/cost-diabetes-canada-over-10-years-applying-attributable-health-care-costs-diabetes-incidence-prediction-model.html https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/reports-publ... https://www.diabetes.co.uk/diet-for-type2-diabetes.html https://www.diabetes.co.uk/diet-for-type2-diabetes.html If you went to a grocery store or restaurant the probability that it's full of sugar/carbs is extremely high. If suddenly tomorrow everyone switches off sugar/carbs, we would have immense food shortages. So we can't really encourage people to switch off carbs. >Worse yet, obesity seems to be increasing rather than decreasing so whatever any politician, healthcare service or advocacy group has done the past 20 years, the USA is still not closer to a solution to the lowering life expectancy. Covid might be over but there will always be a next crisis. Don't say all/any. https://globalfoodresearchprogram.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/SugaryDrink_tax_maps_2020_August_REV.pdf https://globalfoodresearchprogram.org/wp-content/uploads/202... Newfoundland's very popular liberal government implemented a sugar tax recently. I think it's a great idea and those who do it first will benefit in the long run. Flipside, I don't think government should be allowed to do anything with food. No restricting, no taxing, your extent is only in the 'everyone agrees with' category. Food inspectors for example? We can all agree that's important.

ericmay 4y ago

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?

mercy_dude 4y ago
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.
- bparsons 4y ago
  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.

sct202 4y ago

There are graphs from the CDC in this PDF for the data that NYT is reporting: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr023.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr023.pdf Idk why they decided to write out every single number when a chart or graph would have been easier to read.

quenix 4y ago
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?
- colpabar 4y ago
  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!
  - cjbgkagh 4y ago
    I got pericarditis after the booster, it felt like it was going to turn into a heart attack at any moment. I’m fanatical about my health so I could easily imagine others who are less careful getting a heart attack from the vaccine. And due to the anti-vax stigma I’m sure it’s under reported. But I’m assuming covid dominates the deaths.
  - NewJazz 4y ago
    Wouldn't Israel, the most highly vaccinated nation on the planet, see a similar effect? Or other highly vaccinated groups?
    - jerlam 4y ago
      Israel isn't the most vaccinated nation on the planet; it was merely the one of the first to have access to vaccine doses. They're basically on par with the United States now: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?facet=none&Metric=People+fully+vaccinated&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=USA~ITA~CAN~DEU~GBR~FRA~JPN~ISR~IND https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

meremortals 4y ago

Balaji says [0] (on Jackson, Mississippi's lack of running water) > There is no first world and third world anymore. > There is the ascending world, and then there is the descending world. > And this is the descending world. [1] > A similar phenomenon began right before the fall of the Soviet Union. Life expectancy for men fell from a high of 65 years in 1987 to a low of 57 years in 1994 [0](https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1564853661351628802 https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1564853661351628802) [1](https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1564859125829230592?t=fYcEZnWHMVGyuU31zUSmHQ&s=19 https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1564859125829230592?t=fYc...)

simonebrunozzi 4y ago
Remember, correlation <> causation [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau...
incomingpain 4y ago
Is there an expectation for something similar for the USA? Several more years of drop?
- meremortals 4y ago
  That's how I interpret his statements, at least. He goes into more detail in his book The Network State, but essentially says America is descending and the future will be the Anarchistic West vs Communist China. He advocates exiting most systems into a "cloud country" which would ultimately manifest in the real world (aggregate online over similar values, purchase physical land, etc)
  - incomingpain 4y ago
    >That's how I interpret his statements, at least. He goes into more detail in his book The Network State, but essentially says America is descending and the future will be the Anarchistic West vs Communist China. He advocates exiting most systems into a "cloud country" which would ultimately manifest in the real world (aggregate online over similar values, purchase physical land, etc) I'm curious if he is expecting an anarcho-capitalism type system or he's predicting wildwest/dystopian. I feel like that's one of the big political divides. Why is China dominant and being made the boogey man in the USA? They opened free trade zones on their coast. They beat the USA at their own game who contemporarily are increasing taxes. You have everyone piling into Africa to bring them low tax capitalism especially China. They see their peasant war coming because of the ultra wealthy coast and impoverished west. Africa is about to become the next china with ultra cheap labour. China loses those contracts and must rush to replace them. For the USA to beat China, anarcho-capitalism is the likely option. That's the #1 scary unspoken thing about Trump. He represents exactly this. I am intrigued about the cloud country. It almost feels like Estonia might be that place? Or perhaps their attempt?

MontyCarloHall 4y ago

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. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-at-birth-total-years?time=2010..2020&country=~USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-at-birth-...

lolinder 4y ago

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.

curiousllama 4y ago
What gets lumped in with accidental deaths? COVID, Opioid Crisis, and Obesity make sense to me
- CameronNemo 4y ago
  Traffic fatalities.
somenameforme 4y ago
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. [1] - https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.04.05.22273393v4.full-text https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.04.05.22273393v...
- lolinder 4y ago
  Your link is the second in the article. This is the link the article provides in the second paragraph, the one they refer to as "the new report": https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr023.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr023.pdf The paragraph I quoted is drawing from the chart on page 5.

shadowgovt 4y ago

I'm surprised that this news is surprising. A pandemic hit and killed millions of people. It had a disproportionately high impact on the elderly, which will have the effect of "chopping the tail" off a Poisson distribution and dragging the mean down as a result. The past several years of data should almost certainly be considered an outlier that will stand out on a long-term trend now that COVID has vaccines.

rocket_surgeron 4y ago

Decades of high obesity colliding with years of an addiction crisis during a pandemic when the medical system is extremely stressed? Seems about right.

gameshot911 4y ago

This article would have really benefited from an easily-creatsd line chart trending life expectancy over time. It would have given a lot of context to the drop. I was surprised at the oversight by both the NYT journalists and editors.

scarmig 4y ago

> 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. Perhaps an equity lens is merited here.

watwut 4y ago
I dont think that is reasonable expectation. Some issues affect men more - covid, substance abuse, suicide and general violence belonging in that category.
- scarmig 4y ago
  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.
  - watwut 4y ago
    You said that "But the surprising thing is that the gap is increasing;" It is not surprising at all, due to excess mortality being in areas that are traditionally more "manly" reasons to die of + covid.
    - scarmig 4y ago

somenameforme 4y ago

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. Most (all?) proposed explanations fail to do so. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...

lolinder 4y ago
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): 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 https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
pjc50 4y ago
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.

00s_enthusiast 4y ago

[flagged]

pjc50 4y ago

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?

syrrim 4y ago
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.
dionidium 4y ago
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." [0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DpNdUMeXUAAEHA4.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DpNdUMeXUAAEHA4.jpg:large [1] https://streets.mn/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/annual-VMT-driving-chart-international.png https://streets.mn/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/annual-VMT-dri... [2] https://i.insider.com/55831cda69bedde87600549e?width=700&format=jpeg&auto=webp https://i.insider.com/55831cda69bedde87600549e?width=700&for... [3] https://www.issup.net/knowledge-share/publications/2016-09/usa-and-europe-drug-use-compared https://www.issup.net/knowledge-share/publications/2016-09/u...

cjbgkagh 4y ago

I wonder how much further decline is already baked in. People actually dying is a lagging indicator. It’ll be interesting to see the predicted life expectancy for 40 years.