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US Life Expectancy May Have Peaked
Hugh Pickens writes "Live Science reports that although life expectancy in the United States has risen to an all-time high of 77.9 years in 2007 up from 77.7 in 2006, gains in life expectancy may be pretty much over, as some groups — particularly people in rural locations are already stagnating or slipping in contrast to all other industrialized nations. Hardest hit are regions in the Deep South, along the Mississippi River, in Appalachia and also the southern part of the Midwest reaching into Texas. The culprits — largely preventable with better diet and access to medical services — are diabetes, cancers and heart disease caused by smoking, high blood pressure and obesity. What the new analysis reveals is the reality of two Americas, one on par with most of Europe and parts of Asia, and another no different than a third-world nation with the United States placing 41st on the 2008 CIA World Factbook list, behind Bosnia but still edging out Albania. 'Beginning in the early 1980s and continuing through 1999 those who were already disadvantaged did not benefit from the gains in life expectancy experienced by the advantaged, and some became even worse off,' says a report published in PLoS Medicine by a team led by Harvard's Majid Ezzati, adding that 'study results are troubling because an oft-stated aim of the US health system is the improvement of the health of "all people, and especially those at greater risk of health disparities.'"
I know I shouldn't reply to trolls, but... If your medical expenses for a year exceed $35,000 (not hard to do at all), your chance of having your health insurance canceled retroactively is 50%. That link helps explain some of the math, but the testimony it is based is in the public record from the recent House hearings on rescission (the retroactive cancellation of individual health insurance policies).
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
And we are fat because the least expensive foods are all terrible for you, thanks to subsidizes to big agriculture.
Depends on your income. If you make enough to disqualify you for the free stuff, that doesn't mean you automatically make enough to afford health insurance on your own. Rule of thumb is, if you make minimum wage, you can't get the freebies. And I'd love to see somebody pay 2200/yr for the cheapest medical insurance advertised on tv when they make about 16.5K before taxes.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
It's not improbable at all, especially if he lived in a rural area. You can't be denied care for an emergency condition in an ER, but if you're in the ER, it's an emergency. If it's an emergency brought on by a chronic, untreated ailment, odds are you're in pretty bad shape and at a much greater risk of death than if you'd been treated for the underlying cause earlier on. As an example, if you show up in the ER with an undiagnosed malignant tumor in its last stages, you can still be saved, but your odds of being saved are extremely decreased by that point.
Furthermore, many rural areas in the U.S. do not have ready access to the most modern treatment options available. If I go fifteen miles north, as the crow flies, over the mountains I can see out my front window, those people have horrible treatment options. They are, basically, limited to less than half a dozen family doctors and a small free clinic that is not capable even of treating a broken bone. The quickest access they have to modern medicine in an emergency is a 40 minute helicopter flight to the nearest university medical center.
Our doctors, hospitals, specialists, and medicines are, by and large, incredible in the U.S. Our access to them, however, is pretty sorely lacking for a great number of people.
I don't know that he's telling the truth, and I don't know that his brother/friend (sorry, I forgot the relationship) did everything he could have, but, based on the rural area I grew up and still visit sometimes, I could absolutely see how it happens.
I'll get a "woosh" for this, but you might want to read this AP article. Or not, if you're a Rushie.
Free Martian Whores!
"And I'd love to see somebody pay 2200/yr for the cheapest medical insurance advertised on tv when they make about 16.5K before taxes."
Also, if you're in the situation the OP's friend was in you couldn't get health insurance for 10x that much money. American health insurance companies can refuse, outright, to cover you if you have a pre-existing condition. So, someone making minimum wage, and having a hard time even putting food on the table, has to choose between paying that $2200/yr in the off chance they develop a serious illness later in life, or they can go without it and be unable to receive adequate medical care should they end up getting seriously ill.
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
In industrialized countries, obesity is more a problem for the poor. Fatty, sugary (corn syrup!) foods are cheap. They contain lots of calories, but not much other nutrients. The healthy food (fresh veggies and fruits, full grain rice, bread and pasta, quality meat etc) is more expensive.
the portion they're talking about is between Beaumont and Texarkana, right on the border
Which makes me wonder if this was a study of US Citizens or merely US Residents?
It might be hard to eliminate the illegal population from those areas, without finishing the job that the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo stopped and annex all of Mexico.
Wrong border. Beaumont-Texarkana lies along the Texas-Louisiana border.
All of Texas has a high Hispanic population, but that area wouldn't be outstanding in that regard. Maybe even lower than most of the state. It's just a backwards "piney woods" region, sort of a cross between the Ozarks and the Bayou Country. Voodoo-practicin' hillbillies, or something.
Not to belittle the people who live there. (I can get away with hillbilly jokes as an in-group member.) It's just a very economically backward part of the state. Oddly, because Dallas banking and Houston oil lie just to the west of its two termini.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I think it would be extremely instructive if it was expressed as a ratio of - say - life expectancy pr. $ expended pr. year. Or the marginal cost per year of increase, or something. The debate is not really about how long the average person lives . it's about how many people are not treated for even simple ailments (morals), and the effectiveness of the system (cost/benefit).
:)
I am from Denmark, but married to a US citizen. We have a lot of opportunity to compare notes. While Danish doctors are often somewhat rude and will cheerfully refuse to give you a prescription for stuff you are sure you need, we would never see a case like my wife's uncle. He lost his leg because he didn't see a doctor about the pain, and his reason for not seeing the doctor was that he was worried the visit would not be covered by his insurance. When he finally went, it was too late, and they had to amputate. So it goes. Meanwhile, in Denmark the government is often imploring the citizens to see their doctor more often, to keep health costs down by spotting problems before they become expensive to treat.
Personally, I have received many, many treatments ranging from setting of broken limbs to specialist examinations for this and than, and every night I use a C-PAP machine, paid for and maintained by the socialized health system, but supplied by a private specialist. I can, in fact, choose any doctor I want as my GP, or just make an appointment or show up as a walk-in. The only practical limit is that in order to see a specialist, I need a referral from a GP. This has never been a problem for me.
Our system? Socialized with a private option, with an overflow to the private system if the public system is too tardy - again at no extra expense for the user. You can add a private insurance if you wish, and many people choose to do so for things such as dental, plastic surgery etc, but it's really not required to stay hale and taxable
Works fine from where I'm sitting (UK). Always been able to access it, never had treatment refused. The same is true for everyone else in my family.
Change insurer for non-medical reasons (premium, employer change, so on)? Welcome to waitlist hell, and scrutinization for pre-existing conditions, even though the populace's preponderance for a given condition didn't change as a result of your enrollment.
It's a bastardized, one sided situation, and where health insurance is your ONLY realistic option, because collusion and collaboration between insurance providers has ensured that most healthcare rates are jacked up way out of the realm of ordinary affordability, it's very delineating, you either have, or you have not.
Pop Quiz: Do you really think your overnight stay in emergency had an actual cost of $12,000? Do you wonder why the same chiro treatment costs $50 without insurance, but they bill the insurance provider $165 for it? Do you think that the insurance carrier is covering that $115 out of the grace of their heart, or because they employ such amazingly stellar investment gurus that they can do so on the return from the dividend from your premiums?
Where's that bridge and that "for sale" sign?
Here is a comparison of life expectancies between the US and Europe.
I guess it is based on bullshit data. For instance, Switzerland has a much higher life expentancy, see here. 80 years for men, 84 for women.
adjusted for the effects of premature death resulting from non-health-related fatal injuries
Why this adjustment ? Oh, to make data fit to your conclusion ? You live in a violent country, deal with it.
Do check out the blogspot post, but then check this out:
According to "OECD Economic Surveys: United States 2008", p. 137 (http://tinyurl.com/mt3g76):
"It has been claimed (Ohsfeld and Schneider, 2006) that adjusting for the higher death rate from accident or injury in the United States over 1980-99 than the OECD average would increase US life expectancy at birth from 18th of of 29 OECD countries to the highest. In fact, what the panel regression estimated by these authors shows is that predicted life expectancy at birth based on US GDP per capita and OECD average death rates from these causes is the highest in the OECD. The adjustment for the gap in injury death rates between the United States and OECD average alone only increases life expectancy at birth marginally, from 19th on average among 29 countries over 1980-99 to 17th. Hence, the high ranking of adjusted life expectancy mainly reflects high US GDP per capita, not the effects of unusually high death rates from accident and injury."
In other words, the figures in Table 1-5 are not U.S. life expectancies adjusted for fatal injuries, but rather a model that assumes that both the relationship of life expectancy to per capita GDP and injuries in the U.S. follow OECD trends.
That is - they are falsely giving the U.S. credit for having the same basic life expectancy as other other high GDP OECD countries, when in fact it is markedly lower.
Check it out for yourself, the Ohsfeld and Schneider report is at:
http://www.aei.org/docLib/9780844742403.pdf
See p. 20-21.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Maybe if someone does their shopping only at some corner convenience store instead of going a few extra miles to a real grocery store, but that's true of anywhere.
If you're poor enough that the difference between $1.50 Cambell's soup and $1 frozen pizza is critical, then you're not going to have the time or the $3 for bus fare to get to the real grocery store a few miles away. There really are areas where you can't easily get to a grocery store: they are called "food deserts" by those who work on issues surrounding food supplies in poor urban areas.
I am officially gone from
Funny you mention this, my step-dad is dying (6 months to a year) of a cancer (bladder) with a pretty high remission rate that has metastitized because he decided to go the "natural medicine" route instead of chemo & radiation. One of the things the *quacks* he went to had him try was exactly what you mentioned. It's bullshit. The "alkaline-body" treatment is bullshit as well. The quacks that spread this nonsense are making money off killing people as far as I am concerned. He's now taking radiation, but basically, he's not going to make it.
There is a war going on for your mind.
What the fuck, even in the United Kingdom with the NHS for over 60 years now, there is a thriving private insurance industry, with private hospitals. Some employers even over private health insurance, and some people take it out privately.
This is clearly uninformed nonsense, along the lines of claiming that Stephen Hawkings would be dead under the NHS, when he is in fact British and gets excellent treatment without which he would be dead under the NHS.
The thing is that life expectancy is closely tied to your socioeconomic group. The top group in the USA has worse life expectancy and health outcomes than the lowest group in the UK, despite expenditure on health care in the USA being twice the percentage of GDP that it is in the UK.
I don't for one minute claim our health care system is perfect, but it is *FAR* less broken than the one in the USA.
Well, obviously. No system in the world can offer every possible treatment to anyone who might want it - to do so would take unlimited resources, which nobody has. And that includes the USA - it's just your insurance company that makes the choice (or if you're rich you can pay for yourself, but you can do that here too).
The major difference is that it's essentialy impossible for UK citizens to be uninsured - so no refusal of cover for "pre existing conditions", no trying to wriggle out of payment for treatment and no bankruptcy due to medical bills.
However, I think the most telling information about the NHS is that private insurance *is* available in the UK, but few people bother with it (under 10%, and mostly through employers).
All over the place, according to the USDA:
http://www.ers.usda.gov/Publications/AP/AP036/
I am officially gone from
Your understanding is wrong. The US has less economic mobility than most developed nations.
Read this for more.
Oddly enough, generous funding for higher education and universal health care are two of the reasons for higher economic mobility elsewhere. At the time of the report, you were techinically right - the UK was about as bad as the US (and both lagged behind other European societies). Since then, the US has actually fallen even lower in mobility.
Do you wonder why the same chiro treatment costs $50 without insurance, but they bill the insurance provider $165 for it?
I can't speak for everyone, but I know why we bill that way: because the insurance companies will pay a set percentage of the "reasonable and customary" charge for each procedure performed. If that currently happens to be 30%, then a $50 procedure gets billed at $165 so that it actually gets reimbursed at $50. If notice comes down that the new rate is 25%, then expect that to go to $200 overnight. There's also the need to periodically raise rates above the reasonable and customer charge to pull the average upward. If everyone starts billing $200 for the $165 procedure, then insurance will only "allow" $165 at first and will reject the extra $35. After a few years, they'll adjust the allowance to some multiple of the new rate.
Yes, it's horribly screwed up. That's still better than travesties like Medicaid that often reimburses for procedures at less than the cost of the supplies needed to perform them. Yes, you read that right. There are certain billing codes that Medicaid pays at about 5 to 10 percent of what insurance would. It's hard to make up profits with volume when you are literally, tangibly losing money on each treatment. That's why almost no doctors will see new Medicaid patients without a referral from a colleague. Every doctor I know does a lot of free/charity work, but you have to save some time for paying patients if you want to keep the doors open.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Just remember, the USA is better at everything. Why? Because!
The technical term for this idea is American Exceptionalism.
"American exceptionalism (def. "exceptionalism") refers to the theory that the United States occupies a special niche among developed nations[1] in terms of its national credo, historical evolution, political and religious institutions and unique origins. The roots of the term are attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville,[2] who claimed that the then-50-year-old United States held a special place among nations, because it was a country of immigrants and the first modern democracy.[citation needed] The term itself did not emerge until after World War II[3] when it was embraced by neoconservative[4] pundits in what was described in the International Herald Tribune as "an ugly twist of late".[5] More recently, President Barack Obama noted that "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."[6] He also said that "there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive."[7] Research shows that "there is some indication for American exceptionalism among the [U.S.] public, but very little evidence of unilateral attitudes".[2]
The theory of American exceptionalism has a number of opponents, especially from the Left.[8][9] The U.S. Democratic Party in particular is said to be "fundamentally opposed to" American exceptionalism.[10] They argue that the belief is "self-serving and jingoistic" (see slavery and civil rights issues, Western betrayal, and the failure to aid Jews fleeing the Nazis),[1] that it is based on a myth,[11] and that "[t]here is a growing refusal to accept" the idea of exceptionalism both nationally and internationally.[12] "
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Apparently Switzerland, Norway, and Canada have a problem with violent resurrections. How else would eliminating the effects of violence from the picture decrease the mean lifespan?