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Monday, March 27th, 2023

‘Live free and die’? The sad state of U.S. life expectancy

Author:     Selena Simmons-Duffin
Source:     npr
Publication Date:     March 25, 2023 | 7:01 AM ET
 Link: ‘Live free and die’? The sad state of U.S. life expectancy
Stephan:  

We are the greatest. We are the most advanced. We are the world leaders. You hear this kind of crap repeated endlessly in America's corporate media. And that is exactly what it is, crap. Try this, instead, "American children are less likely to live to age 5 than children in other high-income countries." A few days ago I published a report on the decline of life expectancy in the United States. Now, here is a more detailed account of this miserable trend. Do you hear any MAGAts in Congress talking about this? You do not. What you hear from them is, let's cut child care food support, let's gut Medicare. Let's gut Social Security. If you want to hear about fostering wellbeing, listen to Democrats such as Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren. Let's talk about universal birthright single-payer healthcare based on fostering wellbeing.

To read one of the peer-reviewed research papers upon which this article is based see JAMA: The New Crisis of Increasing All-Cause Mortality in US Children and Adolescents

Just before Christmas, federal health officials confirmed life expectancy in America had dropped for a nearly unprecedented second year in a row – down to 76 years. While countries all over the world saw life expectancy rebound during the second year of the pandemic after the arrival of vaccines, the U.S. did not.

Then, last week, more bad news: Maternal mortality in the U.S. reached a high in 2021. Also, a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association found rising mortality rates among U.S. children and adolescents.

“This is the first time in my career that I’ve ever seen [an increase in pediatric mortality] – it’s always been declining in the United States for as long as I can remember,” says the JAMA paper’s lead author Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University. “Now, it’s increasing at a magnitude that has not occurred at least for half a century.”

Across the lifespan, and across every demographic group, Americans die at younger ages than their counterparts in other wealthy nations.

How could this […]

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