8 ms·

U.S. life expectancy hits all-time high

40 points by brandonb 9mo ago

deleted 9mo ago
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drsalt 9mo ago
There are many different populations in the USA. How useful is the overall life expectancy average? What decision can I make with this information?
- readthenotes1 9mo ago
  It's bad news for social security and Medicare. The men vs women numbers otherwise are pretty useless for the reason you gave
- mmooss 9mo ago
  The significance is obvious: People in the US are getting healthier, by a significant metric. That doesn't matter? The US is a relativley well-defined group, sharing many inputs and consuming many of the same resources, including the same national health care resources for research, care, regulation, etc. > There are many different populations in the USA. Are you saying only your 'population' matters to you? What do you mean by it exactly? There are lots of populations everywhere, and every population can be broken down into more populations. Any aggregate number won't describe you as an individual, even if it's a number for your own family. Is this just a repeat of the old racial trope here?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843222
  - drsalt 9mo ago
    no, i think you're imagining a lot of things. i'm just saying it is very coarse metric by which to understand anything at all. But, I'm not in any way educated in this metric so i'm open to anyone telling me how it is useful, like I asked initially.
N_Lens 9mo ago
Yet still lower than other developed nations, especially considering the exorbitant expenditure (per capita) on healthcare.
- 0xy 9mo ago
  Impossible to compare without controlling for demographics. White people in the US have comparable rates to Europe. Diversity means diversity in health outcomes, which are vastly different between groups.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - Maxatar 9mo ago
    >White people in the US have comparable rates to Europe. No it's not. White non Hispanic population in the U.S. has a life expectancy of 77.5, which is lower than the U.S. average life expectancy and comparable to Eastern Europe, but not Europe as a whole (life expectancy of 81.4).
  - mmooss 9mo ago
    That needs clear causal evidence that race somehow causes health outcomes, otherwise there's nothing distinguishing it from the old racial prejudice - now including blaming the victim: There is a lot of evidence of a causal relationship between being non-white and having less access to healthcare, nutrition, and other things that affect health outcomes, and that evidence aligns well with being targets of racial discrimination. When we just repeat baseless claims about race, we risk perpetuating it. I've never seen evidence of a racial difference in accessing health care that is accessible. It's hard to believe skin color would affect that, while it's easy to believe (and witness) that it affects what you have access to.
    - rayiner 9mo ago
      You shouldn’t make an assumption in either direction. There’s clearly a racial aspect to life expectancy—east asian countries tend to have higher life expectancy than other countries with similar GDP per capita: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-un-vs-gdp-per-capita-wb https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-un-vs-gdp.... Your argument about access to healthcare based on race doesn’t make sense either. Hispanics in the U.S. live longer than white people, despite having the highest rate of lacking health insurance.
userbinator 9mo ago
I've always found the numbers in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe... rather interesting, because of how different the cultures and living conditions are even among the top countries. Hong Kong and Japan are always around the top, but so are Switzerland and Australia.
- defrost 9mo ago
  Australia has * food standards for shops and franchises .. McDonalds here has better salads that in the US, * sport and activity as a fundemental part of most lives, * good health care for all, even for "bottom tier" unemployed, with hybrid public/private health insurance and literal walk in, fall over, free heart surgery and follow up (for those that cannot pay). Stats wise, higher life expectancy and better cancer survival rates* * Yes, better, but not by much .. just cheaper and across the demographics.
- cthalupa 9mo ago
  We have a huge amount of data around physical size being inversely correlated with lifespan. The bigger you are, no matter what drives it - height, muscle mass, body fat, etc. - the lower your life expectancy is. Obviously lots of other factors, but it does help explain part of why we see much of the most developed portions of Asia at the top of the list. Switzerland is an interesting counterpoint, though - average height there is taller than most of Europe - though their obesity rates are about half of that of the European average.
  - eudamoniac 9mo ago
    This is incorrect re muscle mass. Muscle mass is one of the best indicators of longevity.
    - cthalupa 9mo ago
      It's still correct, but like most things related to human health, there are many different factors at play. The practical consideration for most people is not just getting too much, or having high levels of both muscle and fat, increasing your total body size more than just being one or the other. Higher muscle mass tends to mean better insulin sensitivity, a higher general level of physical fitness, etc. etc. etc. These are all larger beneficial improvements than the problem with just being a larger person. But if you look at two people of different heights, the same FFMI, etc., the larger person will have lower life expectancy, and it's not because their head is a few inches higher in the air, and despite having a similar body composition and more total muscle mass. (Obviously controlling for all other variables) We know that blood flow demand increases put additional strain on the heart. We know this is one of the causes of things like LVH and other negative cardiac remodeling. We know that at rest, muscle and fat mass have essentially identical blood flow requirements. Even natural powerlifters when having their heart scans have found increased septum and posterior wall thickness without the increase in chamber size that endurance athletes have that keeps function optimal - they have diastolic function loss. In fact, in many of the negative imaging results, they found minimal difference between natural powerlifters and enhanced - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4079743/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4079743/ People get obstructive sleep apnea from too much muscle mass, even at low levels of body fat. On the enhanced side, we see better health outcomes from people that both drop the AAS usage alongside letting them size go down vs. those that just come off the gear. (You can keep very significant portions of your enhanced gains while at physiological levels, as long as you maintain strict training, protein intake, etc. It's one of the reasons that many people argue that the 7-10 year bans in natural powerlifting federations is not actually effective.) It's a u shaped curve. At some point all of the health benefits of muscle can't make up for the increased cardiovascular strain. The majority of people have more risk from their less-muscular body composition so building more will almost certainly benefit them, but that's not the same as the idea that body size, from any cause, doesn't have a negative correlation with longevity.
mullingitover 9mo ago
It says a lot that the US isn’t beating poverty-stricken Cuba on this metric, considering the eye-watering prices that are extorted from patients.
- coliveira 9mo ago
  The current admin is doing everything they can to stop this trend, but by making life worse in the island, as they don't want to do anything about the health of US citizens.
- thomassmith65 9mo ago
  The healthcare system is one of the few things in Cuba that isn't dysfunctional. It's said to be excellent.
  - ch4s3 9mo ago
    > It's said to be excellent This is laughably untrue.[1][2][3] They're lacked basic supplies for 30 years. Frequent blackouts also complicate or prevent many types of care. [1] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250709-bitter-pill-cuba-runs-low-on-life-saving-medicines https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250709-bitter-pill-c... [2] https://cuba.miami.edu/business-economy/a-close-look-at-cubas-health-care-system/index.html https://cuba.miami.edu/business-economy/a-close-look-at-cuba... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Cuba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Cuba
    - estebank 9mo ago
      > They're lacked basic supplies for 30 years. Cuba has been under embargo for 66 years.
      - ch4s3 9mo ago
        The embargo doesn’t cover medical supplies and Cuban buys what medicine and medical supplies it has mainly from the US. The embargo also doesn’t cover food. Cuba also does a lot of trade with China and Spain but has relatively little to actually sell because the state controlled industries are so unproductive. Cuba also has the least productive agricultural sector in the Caribbean, despite being the most productive before the revolution. The embargo is no excuse it doesn’t cover other countries, and Cuba has always had European trade partners. In fact they received free oil, agricultural equipment, and technical support from the USSR, and later free oil from Venezuela until a few weeks ago.
pinkmuffinere 9mo ago
Is this not just because Covid killed off many of the weakest individuals? I suspect we just traded deaths in 2021 for deaths in 2025, making this latest data look better, without fundamental improvement. Not to say with confidence that _no_ improvement has been made, but that I think the stats for _this one year_ are probably not very meaningful. Maybe I misunderstood something though?
- thesmtsolver2 9mo ago
  No, not just weeding out due to Covid. If that was the case, you won't see death rates decrease across multiple groups and not just the weakest groups. > Death rates declined across all racial and ethnic groups, and in both men and women. https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/publichealth/119643 https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/publichealth... > It's the result of not only the dissipation of the COVID-19 pandemicopens in a new tab or window, but also waning death rates from all the nation's top killers, including heart disease, cancer, and drug overdoses.
  - klooney 9mo ago
    GLP1 theory of everything
    - Balgair 9mo ago
      https://www.drugdiscoverytrends.com/top-25-drugs-by-sales-2025-h1/ https://www.drugdiscoverytrends.com/top-25-drugs-by-sales-20... Obesity drugs are in the top 25 for 2025, but don't make up the largest plurality. That goes to oncology drugs at ~1/3rd. Obesity drugs are at ~14%. I want to mention here that these oncology drugs are mostly antibody methods. Which, what the hell? We're making antibody drugs at scale now?! And that's like some of the highest selling drugs out there? For comparison, though not in the linked article here, Acetaminophen (Tylenol) only comes in at ~$4.3B, which would put it way down in 13th place, out of the top 10. Granted, this is sales numbers, and in the US, that's practically taking the savings of very sick people and turning it into stocks. Something that elicits no small reaction here on HN or just about anywhere. Still, to the point of the main article, yes, we live in an age of medical miracles, and it arrived quite suddenly, only in the last 7 years or so, and we have a lot of gas in this tank.
deleted 9mo ago
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jackschultz 9mo ago
I wonder how much this might change in the coming years purely from GLP-1s. Articles like this[0] (which yes, Betteridge's law applies) talk about how it’s pretty likely they’ll be able to be used by everyone. But even now, taking people with cardiovascular high probabilities and dropping that risk way down purely by giving them the feeling that they’re more full more frequently is crazy to think about. Not sure opinions here but I’m at the point of telling my parents they should both be on these right now in their upper 60s. Some people shrug it off or claim that they’re higher status because they lost weight via diet and exercise, but I map that to people who think they’re better programmers because they don’t use llms for coding, when the real result is what matters. Similar to people thinking AI slop, there are news articles about what happens if you stop GLP-1s and gain the weight back. But the stories of people who either continue to microdose, or also learn the feelings of their body and how it differs have long term success. Similar to those who know how to work with llms get good results, but the news is about how smarter people don’t use it. All very interesting subjects. What a world we’re in. [0] https://www.derekthompson.org/p/why-does-it-seem-like-glp-1-drugs https://www.derekthompson.org/p/why-does-it-seem-like-glp-1-...
- ls612 9mo ago
  Obesity reduction if seen through in the long run will have comparable benefits to smoking cessation. The scale of the win here is hard to overstate.
  - m0llusk 9mo ago
    Then the reductions in lean muscle mass will start to become visible in all cause mortality statistics. This could be a rough ride.
    - TheDong 9mo ago
      What does "less muscle-mass" mean in terms of mortality statistics? We already know women live longer than men on average, and also have less muscle-mass than men on average, so clearly it's not having too much of an impact on women. Without looking into actual statistics here, Japan is known for having a high life expectancy, and stereotypically Japan's population is both relatively thin, and has relatively little muscle, so that also seems to defy that expectation. What sort of mortality are you expecting here?
ls612 9mo ago
Everyone wants to shit on this news but I think it’s amazing. You can’t go back and change the past but if you’re doing better than you’ve ever done before there’s reason to celebrate even if it would have been nicer if it happened in 2016.
- tjwebbnorfolk 9mo ago
  Trump is in office therefore no one is allowed to be happy about anything good happening in the US. You're only allowed to say "yea but it'd be way better if..."
  - throwaway290 9mo ago
    Life expectancy stats change over a long time, the cause can be half a century ago
    - tremon 9mo ago
      Regardless, it's a certainty that Trump and RFK will be claiming this as their win.
      - deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
russellbeattie 9mo ago
I don't think this is necessarily a good thing. The world would be a demonstrably better place if the average life expectancy had remained around 70, like it was the year I was born. Every new generation deals with growing populations to one degree or a other. World population has doubled in my lifetime for example. But human society just isn't made to have so many long lived people hoarding wealth and power decades beyond what they historically have. GenX finally outnumbers the Boomers, but that should have happened a decade ago. The damage they've inflicted on the younger generations is really incalculable. I think as time goes by, we may have to decide that people over a certain age are to be legally treated the same as those under 18.
- andrekandre 9mo ago
  > The world would be a demonstrably better place if the average life expectancy had remained around 70, like it was the year I was born. idk, the world was a totally messed-up place long before that... > The damage they've inflicted on the younger generations is really incalculable. if you think that is bad, just wait until they solve aging itself... imagine if we had to argue with 400 year old generals from colonial times.... or robber-barrons of 150+ years ago still trying to dominate everything.
- president_zippy 9mo ago
  "One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic." I suppose rooting for people to die doesn't sound barbarous, so long as you're not rooting for anyone in particular to die.
- chneu 9mo ago
  Yeah this is bad news from an environmental standpoint. We can't stop our status symbol consumption and travel lifestyles. This is just more people to feed, which in our current broken system means more consumption and waste at insane scales.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 9mo ago
That 5 years difference between men and women keeps being biologically weird
- lotsofpulp 9mo ago
  Why? They have vastly different biologies.
  - lostlogin 9mo ago
    That’s not the only reason. Men are treated differently to women in healthcare. There is no shortage of data on this. Here is one example: https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/newsroom/news-releases/lancet-public-health-global-study-reveals-stark-differences https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/newsroom/news-release...
    - istjohn 9mo ago
      Your source doesn't support your claim.
      - lostlogin 9mo ago
        Thank you. Ironically, the above link is a good discussion on biological differences in morbidity, which was the parent comment’s point, and not what I was trying to show. For differences in healthcare men and women receive, I was after a something like this: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2096490/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2096490/
        iowemoretohim 9mo ago
        Look long enough and you will always find something to support your claim.
    - lotsofpulp 9mo ago
      When Fire-Dragon-DoL writes >That 5 years difference between men and women keeps being biologically weird The implication is that the "biological" expectation would be that men and women have the same life expectancy, absent medical intervention and societal standards and whatnot. But it is possible that, due to having different biologies, men and women simply have different life expectancies. Similar to how men and women have different muscle mass and bone densities and height and yada yada. Obviously, external factors could also be a factor, but my point is "internal" factors are also in play.
rayiner 9mo ago
Comparing these statistics across countries is not useful without demographic adjustment. For example, Hispanics in the U.S. have a higher life expectancy than white people in the UK: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/13te521/life_expectancy_of_raceethnicity_in_the_uk/ https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/13te521/life_expect....
- mmooss 9mo ago
  > Comparing these statistics across countries is useless without demographic adjustment. Why is it useless? Any aggregate number can be broken down different ways into different groupings - region, age, education, income, wealth, smoking/not, weight, smartphone use, exercise, sleep, etc etc. By your argument, any aggregate number is useless because, no matter what the researcher chooses, it could be broken down differently. So why choose race? I think the fact that so many in this discussion repeat the partisan trope - long used to oppose taxpayer-funded services such as healthcare, education, housing, food, etc. - of dividing people by race, is very telling.
  - sublinear 9mo ago
    Hispanic isn't a race
  - rayiner 9mo ago
    Statistics show there is a huge difference in life expectancy based on recency of immigration. Most hispanics in the U.S. are immigrants or children of immigrants. They have the second highest life expectancy despite having the lowest access to healthcare. That’s plausibly explained by the fact that immigrants are more likely to be healthier than the average person in their country.
    - mmooss 9mo ago
      > immigrants are more likely to be healthier than the average person in their country. That makes sense to me. Unhealthy people are less likely to make the (often) physically gruelling trip and take on the potentially gruelling lifestyle, and all the uncertainty. The same, I expect, applies to motivation - people thoughtlessly call immigrants 'lazy', but the lazy people don't give up their familiar lives and move - many crossing jungles and risking criminals - someplace where they have nothing, not even legal status, often not even the language, and start from scratch - with the goal that after a lifetime of hard work, your children will be comfortable.
pinkmuffinere 9mo ago
> “There are still critical problems in the U.S. public health profile. It should not be big news when the life expectancy rises, which happens every year in every other developed country,” Cohen says Wow, that’s a really biting criticism of US public health — and rightly so
ingakay 9mo ago
[dead]
deleted 9mo ago
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tsoukase 9mo ago
If you want to grow up a nation of centenarians, you whould like to promote the following for ALL of them: 1) keep BMI in the low 20s (yes, it's considered normal but difficult to maintain) 2) increase physical exercise: no cars and elevators, yes feet and bicycles 3) ban processed foods and promote cooked ones using local ingredients 4) tackle air pollution, car accidents, work safety and other forms of environmental hazard 5) improve healthcare in a free to all basis, which is of astonishing low importance 6) reduce life stress, which is a subject huge, complicated and subjective that whould need its own ministry, if you are dedicated enough
RickJWagner 9mo ago
Living a long time is one thing, living healthy and happy is another. I don’t have much interest in adding years to my life if they are miserable years. A wise man once said the goal is to live a long, healthy and vigorous life, then die suddenly.
- chneu 9mo ago
  Functional years are a big concern. A lot of people, especially self inflicted diabetics, spend the last 20ish years of their lives at home doing nothing because their self inflicted disease makes it hard. Same with most diet or stress caused illnesses, like cardiovascular diseases or lung diseases.

40 points by brandonb 9mo ago

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

There are many different populations in the USA. How useful is the overall life expectancy average? What decision can I make with this information?

readthenotes1 9mo ago
It's bad news for social security and Medicare. The men vs women numbers otherwise are pretty useless for the reason you gave
mmooss 9mo ago
The significance is obvious: People in the US are getting healthier, by a significant metric. That doesn't matter? The US is a relativley well-defined group, sharing many inputs and consuming many of the same resources, including the same national health care resources for research, care, regulation, etc. > There are many different populations in the USA. Are you saying only your 'population' matters to you? What do you mean by it exactly? There are lots of populations everywhere, and every population can be broken down into more populations. Any aggregate number won't describe you as an individual, even if it's a number for your own family. Is this just a repeat of the old racial trope here?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843222
- drsalt 9mo ago
  no, i think you're imagining a lot of things. i'm just saying it is very coarse metric by which to understand anything at all. But, I'm not in any way educated in this metric so i'm open to anyone telling me how it is useful, like I asked initially.

N_Lens 9mo ago

Yet still lower than other developed nations, especially considering the exorbitant expenditure (per capita) on healthcare.

0xy 9mo ago
Impossible to compare without controlling for demographics. White people in the US have comparable rates to Europe. Diversity means diversity in health outcomes, which are vastly different between groups.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- Maxatar 9mo ago
  >White people in the US have comparable rates to Europe. No it's not. White non Hispanic population in the U.S. has a life expectancy of 77.5, which is lower than the U.S. average life expectancy and comparable to Eastern Europe, but not Europe as a whole (life expectancy of 81.4).
- mmooss 9mo ago
  That needs clear causal evidence that race somehow causes health outcomes, otherwise there's nothing distinguishing it from the old racial prejudice - now including blaming the victim: There is a lot of evidence of a causal relationship between being non-white and having less access to healthcare, nutrition, and other things that affect health outcomes, and that evidence aligns well with being targets of racial discrimination. When we just repeat baseless claims about race, we risk perpetuating it. I've never seen evidence of a racial difference in accessing health care that is accessible. It's hard to believe skin color would affect that, while it's easy to believe (and witness) that it affects what you have access to.
  - rayiner 9mo ago
    You shouldn’t make an assumption in either direction. There’s clearly a racial aspect to life expectancy—east asian countries tend to have higher life expectancy than other countries with similar GDP per capita: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-un-vs-gdp-per-capita-wb https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-un-vs-gdp.... Your argument about access to healthcare based on race doesn’t make sense either. Hispanics in the U.S. live longer than white people, despite having the highest rate of lacking health insurance.

userbinator 9mo ago

I've always found the numbers in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe... rather interesting, because of how different the cultures and living conditions are even among the top countries. Hong Kong and Japan are always around the top, but so are Switzerland and Australia.

defrost 9mo ago
Australia has * food standards for shops and franchises .. McDonalds here has better salads that in the US, * sport and activity as a fundemental part of most lives, * good health care for all, even for "bottom tier" unemployed, with hybrid public/private health insurance and literal walk in, fall over, free heart surgery and follow up (for those that cannot pay). Stats wise, higher life expectancy and better cancer survival rates* * Yes, better, but not by much .. just cheaper and across the demographics.
cthalupa 9mo ago
We have a huge amount of data around physical size being inversely correlated with lifespan. The bigger you are, no matter what drives it - height, muscle mass, body fat, etc. - the lower your life expectancy is. Obviously lots of other factors, but it does help explain part of why we see much of the most developed portions of Asia at the top of the list. Switzerland is an interesting counterpoint, though - average height there is taller than most of Europe - though their obesity rates are about half of that of the European average.
- eudamoniac 9mo ago
  This is incorrect re muscle mass. Muscle mass is one of the best indicators of longevity.
  - cthalupa 9mo ago
    It's still correct, but like most things related to human health, there are many different factors at play. The practical consideration for most people is not just getting too much, or having high levels of both muscle and fat, increasing your total body size more than just being one or the other. Higher muscle mass tends to mean better insulin sensitivity, a higher general level of physical fitness, etc. etc. etc. These are all larger beneficial improvements than the problem with just being a larger person. But if you look at two people of different heights, the same FFMI, etc., the larger person will have lower life expectancy, and it's not because their head is a few inches higher in the air, and despite having a similar body composition and more total muscle mass. (Obviously controlling for all other variables) We know that blood flow demand increases put additional strain on the heart. We know this is one of the causes of things like LVH and other negative cardiac remodeling. We know that at rest, muscle and fat mass have essentially identical blood flow requirements. Even natural powerlifters when having their heart scans have found increased septum and posterior wall thickness without the increase in chamber size that endurance athletes have that keeps function optimal - they have diastolic function loss. In fact, in many of the negative imaging results, they found minimal difference between natural powerlifters and enhanced - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4079743/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4079743/ People get obstructive sleep apnea from too much muscle mass, even at low levels of body fat. On the enhanced side, we see better health outcomes from people that both drop the AAS usage alongside letting them size go down vs. those that just come off the gear. (You can keep very significant portions of your enhanced gains while at physiological levels, as long as you maintain strict training, protein intake, etc. It's one of the reasons that many people argue that the 7-10 year bans in natural powerlifting federations is not actually effective.) It's a u shaped curve. At some point all of the health benefits of muscle can't make up for the increased cardiovascular strain. The majority of people have more risk from their less-muscular body composition so building more will almost certainly benefit them, but that's not the same as the idea that body size, from any cause, doesn't have a negative correlation with longevity.

mullingitover 9mo ago

It says a lot that the US isn’t beating poverty-stricken Cuba on this metric, considering the eye-watering prices that are extorted from patients.

coliveira 9mo ago
The current admin is doing everything they can to stop this trend, but by making life worse in the island, as they don't want to do anything about the health of US citizens.
thomassmith65 9mo ago
The healthcare system is one of the few things in Cuba that isn't dysfunctional. It's said to be excellent.
- ch4s3 9mo ago
  > It's said to be excellent This is laughably untrue.[1][2][3] They're lacked basic supplies for 30 years. Frequent blackouts also complicate or prevent many types of care. [1] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250709-bitter-pill-cuba-runs-low-on-life-saving-medicines https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250709-bitter-pill-c... [2] https://cuba.miami.edu/business-economy/a-close-look-at-cubas-health-care-system/index.html https://cuba.miami.edu/business-economy/a-close-look-at-cuba... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Cuba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Cuba
  - estebank 9mo ago
    > They're lacked basic supplies for 30 years. Cuba has been under embargo for 66 years.
    - ch4s3 9mo ago
      The embargo doesn’t cover medical supplies and Cuban buys what medicine and medical supplies it has mainly from the US. The embargo also doesn’t cover food. Cuba also does a lot of trade with China and Spain but has relatively little to actually sell because the state controlled industries are so unproductive. Cuba also has the least productive agricultural sector in the Caribbean, despite being the most productive before the revolution. The embargo is no excuse it doesn’t cover other countries, and Cuba has always had European trade partners. In fact they received free oil, agricultural equipment, and technical support from the USSR, and later free oil from Venezuela until a few weeks ago.

pinkmuffinere 9mo ago

Is this not just because Covid killed off many of the weakest individuals? I suspect we just traded deaths in 2021 for deaths in 2025, making this latest data look better, without fundamental improvement. Not to say with confidence that _no_ improvement has been made, but that I think the stats for _this one year_ are probably not very meaningful. Maybe I misunderstood something though?

thesmtsolver2 9mo ago
No, not just weeding out due to Covid. If that was the case, you won't see death rates decrease across multiple groups and not just the weakest groups. > Death rates declined across all racial and ethnic groups, and in both men and women. https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/publichealth/119643 https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/publichealth... > It's the result of not only the dissipation of the COVID-19 pandemicopens in a new tab or window, but also waning death rates from all the nation's top killers, including heart disease, cancer, and drug overdoses.
- klooney 9mo ago
  GLP1 theory of everything
  - Balgair 9mo ago
    https://www.drugdiscoverytrends.com/top-25-drugs-by-sales-2025-h1/ https://www.drugdiscoverytrends.com/top-25-drugs-by-sales-20... Obesity drugs are in the top 25 for 2025, but don't make up the largest plurality. That goes to oncology drugs at ~1/3rd. Obesity drugs are at ~14%. I want to mention here that these oncology drugs are mostly antibody methods. Which, what the hell? We're making antibody drugs at scale now?! And that's like some of the highest selling drugs out there? For comparison, though not in the linked article here, Acetaminophen (Tylenol) only comes in at ~$4.3B, which would put it way down in 13th place, out of the top 10. Granted, this is sales numbers, and in the US, that's practically taking the savings of very sick people and turning it into stocks. Something that elicits no small reaction here on HN or just about anywhere. Still, to the point of the main article, yes, we live in an age of medical miracles, and it arrived quite suddenly, only in the last 7 years or so, and we have a lot of gas in this tank.

deleted 9mo ago

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jackschultz 9mo ago

I wonder how much this might change in the coming years purely from GLP-1s. Articles like this[0] (which yes, Betteridge's law applies) talk about how it’s pretty likely they’ll be able to be used by everyone. But even now, taking people with cardiovascular high probabilities and dropping that risk way down purely by giving them the feeling that they’re more full more frequently is crazy to think about. Not sure opinions here but I’m at the point of telling my parents they should both be on these right now in their upper 60s. Some people shrug it off or claim that they’re higher status because they lost weight via diet and exercise, but I map that to people who think they’re better programmers because they don’t use llms for coding, when the real result is what matters. Similar to people thinking AI slop, there are news articles about what happens if you stop GLP-1s and gain the weight back. But the stories of people who either continue to microdose, or also learn the feelings of their body and how it differs have long term success. Similar to those who know how to work with llms get good results, but the news is about how smarter people don’t use it. All very interesting subjects. What a world we’re in. [0] https://www.derekthompson.org/p/why-does-it-seem-like-glp-1-drugs https://www.derekthompson.org/p/why-does-it-seem-like-glp-1-...

ls612 9mo ago
Obesity reduction if seen through in the long run will have comparable benefits to smoking cessation. The scale of the win here is hard to overstate.
- m0llusk 9mo ago
  Then the reductions in lean muscle mass will start to become visible in all cause mortality statistics. This could be a rough ride.
  - TheDong 9mo ago
    What does "less muscle-mass" mean in terms of mortality statistics? We already know women live longer than men on average, and also have less muscle-mass than men on average, so clearly it's not having too much of an impact on women. Without looking into actual statistics here, Japan is known for having a high life expectancy, and stereotypically Japan's population is both relatively thin, and has relatively little muscle, so that also seems to defy that expectation. What sort of mortality are you expecting here?

ls612 9mo ago

Everyone wants to shit on this news but I think it’s amazing. You can’t go back and change the past but if you’re doing better than you’ve ever done before there’s reason to celebrate even if it would have been nicer if it happened in 2016.

tjwebbnorfolk 9mo ago
Trump is in office therefore no one is allowed to be happy about anything good happening in the US. You're only allowed to say "yea but it'd be way better if..."
- throwaway290 9mo ago
  Life expectancy stats change over a long time, the cause can be half a century ago
  - tremon 9mo ago
    Regardless, it's a certainty that Trump and RFK will be claiming this as their win.
    - deleted 9mo ago
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russellbeattie 9mo ago

I don't think this is necessarily a good thing. The world would be a demonstrably better place if the average life expectancy had remained around 70, like it was the year I was born. Every new generation deals with growing populations to one degree or a other. World population has doubled in my lifetime for example. But human society just isn't made to have so many long lived people hoarding wealth and power decades beyond what they historically have. GenX finally outnumbers the Boomers, but that should have happened a decade ago. The damage they've inflicted on the younger generations is really incalculable. I think as time goes by, we may have to decide that people over a certain age are to be legally treated the same as those under 18.

andrekandre 9mo ago
> The world would be a demonstrably better place if the average life expectancy had remained around 70, like it was the year I was born. idk, the world was a totally messed-up place long before that... > The damage they've inflicted on the younger generations is really incalculable. if you think that is bad, just wait until they solve aging itself... imagine if we had to argue with 400 year old generals from colonial times.... or robber-barrons of 150+ years ago still trying to dominate everything.
president_zippy 9mo ago
"One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic." I suppose rooting for people to die doesn't sound barbarous, so long as you're not rooting for anyone in particular to die.
chneu 9mo ago
Yeah this is bad news from an environmental standpoint. We can't stop our status symbol consumption and travel lifestyles. This is just more people to feed, which in our current broken system means more consumption and waste at insane scales.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 9mo ago

That 5 years difference between men and women keeps being biologically weird

lotsofpulp 9mo ago
Why? They have vastly different biologies.
- lostlogin 9mo ago
  That’s not the only reason. Men are treated differently to women in healthcare. There is no shortage of data on this. Here is one example: https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/newsroom/news-releases/lancet-public-health-global-study-reveals-stark-differences https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/newsroom/news-release...
  - istjohn 9mo ago
    Your source doesn't support your claim.
    - lostlogin 9mo ago
      Thank you. Ironically, the above link is a good discussion on biological differences in morbidity, which was the parent comment’s point, and not what I was trying to show. For differences in healthcare men and women receive, I was after a something like this: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2096490/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2096490/
      - iowemoretohim 9mo ago
        Look long enough and you will always find something to support your claim.
  - lotsofpulp 9mo ago
    When Fire-Dragon-DoL writes >That 5 years difference between men and women keeps being biologically weird The implication is that the "biological" expectation would be that men and women have the same life expectancy, absent medical intervention and societal standards and whatnot. But it is possible that, due to having different biologies, men and women simply have different life expectancies. Similar to how men and women have different muscle mass and bone densities and height and yada yada. Obviously, external factors could also be a factor, but my point is "internal" factors are also in play.

rayiner 9mo ago

Comparing these statistics across countries is not useful without demographic adjustment. For example, Hispanics in the U.S. have a higher life expectancy than white people in the UK: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/13te521/life_expectancy_of_raceethnicity_in_the_uk/ https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/13te521/life_expect....

mmooss 9mo ago
> Comparing these statistics across countries is useless without demographic adjustment. Why is it useless? Any aggregate number can be broken down different ways into different groupings - region, age, education, income, wealth, smoking/not, weight, smartphone use, exercise, sleep, etc etc. By your argument, any aggregate number is useless because, no matter what the researcher chooses, it could be broken down differently. So why choose race? I think the fact that so many in this discussion repeat the partisan trope - long used to oppose taxpayer-funded services such as healthcare, education, housing, food, etc. - of dividing people by race, is very telling.
- sublinear 9mo ago
  Hispanic isn't a race
- rayiner 9mo ago
  Statistics show there is a huge difference in life expectancy based on recency of immigration. Most hispanics in the U.S. are immigrants or children of immigrants. They have the second highest life expectancy despite having the lowest access to healthcare. That’s plausibly explained by the fact that immigrants are more likely to be healthier than the average person in their country.
  - mmooss 9mo ago
    > immigrants are more likely to be healthier than the average person in their country. That makes sense to me. Unhealthy people are less likely to make the (often) physically gruelling trip and take on the potentially gruelling lifestyle, and all the uncertainty. The same, I expect, applies to motivation - people thoughtlessly call immigrants 'lazy', but the lazy people don't give up their familiar lives and move - many crossing jungles and risking criminals - someplace where they have nothing, not even legal status, often not even the language, and start from scratch - with the goal that after a lifetime of hard work, your children will be comfortable.

pinkmuffinere 9mo ago

> “There are still critical problems in the U.S. public health profile. It should not be big news when the life expectancy rises, which happens every year in every other developed country,” Cohen says Wow, that’s a really biting criticism of US public health — and rightly so

ingakay 9mo ago

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tsoukase 9mo ago

If you want to grow up a nation of centenarians, you whould like to promote the following for ALL of them: 1) keep BMI in the low 20s (yes, it's considered normal but difficult to maintain) 2) increase physical exercise: no cars and elevators, yes feet and bicycles 3) ban processed foods and promote cooked ones using local ingredients 4) tackle air pollution, car accidents, work safety and other forms of environmental hazard 5) improve healthcare in a free to all basis, which is of astonishing low importance 6) reduce life stress, which is a subject huge, complicated and subjective that whould need its own ministry, if you are dedicated enough

RickJWagner 9mo ago

Living a long time is one thing, living healthy and happy is another. I don’t have much interest in adding years to my life if they are miserable years. A wise man once said the goal is to live a long, healthy and vigorous life, then die suddenly.

chneu 9mo ago
Functional years are a big concern. A lot of people, especially self inflicted diabetics, spend the last 20ish years of their lives at home doing nothing because their self inflicted disease makes it hard. Same with most diet or stress caused illnesses, like cardiovascular diseases or lung diseases.