US Death Rate Rises, Health Officials Aren't Sure Why (nbcnews.com)

New submitter Ungrounded Lightning writes: According to The New York Times, the U.S. death rate has risen for the first time in more than a decade (or several decades if particular). The rise is across the whole population, though whites, especially the less educated among them, were recently (and separately) documented to be particularly hard hit. The article speculates about drug abuse (prescription as well as illegal), suicides, and Alzheimer's, though it notes that heart disease -- which had been consistently dropping -- has also risen. No mention was made of whether the cutover to Obamacare might have had some effect. The aging of the population was mentioned, though the rise is present even within particular age groups. The National Center for Health Statistics shows the adjusted death rate went up from 723 deaths per 100,000 people in 2014 to nearly 730 deaths per 100,000 in 2015. We do know that the suicide rate in the U.S. has surged to its highest level in almost three decades.

Comments

Re:Recession is really a depression

[peragrin]

If you don't know why you aren't happy, then change.

drugs legal or not is only rarely the answer. Find a new job, move to a new city, hell a new place to live, do something you wouldn't normally do. Get

change.

I do it on a regular basis.

Re:WTF with the spurious Obamacare reference?

[ScentCone]

There was no "good bill handed to congress." But Obama's vote-buying, pandering wish list (which was nothing more than a craven bit of theater, part of the overall scam) he asked Pelosi and Reid to incorporate was even WORSE that what we're now stuck with. His own party, and ONLY his own party, pushed it through on lies and obfuscation, with every single member of the other party pointing out what a disaster it would be, and giving it not even the cover a single vote in its favor. Splitting hairs over whether some priority bending policy detail or another in the law as written would have been better or worse as tweaked by the Democrats running the legislature or the Democrats running the executive branch at the time the con job was carried out - it's just silly. The main point is that the entire concept of the thing is fundamentally flawed, as it bears in reality no resemblance to the frothy talking point lies that Obama and his partners in the House and Senate spun for months ahead of time, and which have been shown to have been purposeful deception.

Deliberate, knowing lies. Intended specifically to deceive people into providing political support for a bill that nobody could bother themselves to read. There was no "good version," there was only a pile of crap from the beginning, made even worse by Obama's capricious, unconstitutional use of his "pen" to unilaterally change the law's purpose and implementation after the fact once people started to catch on to what a disaster it was. And his executive action along those lines? All it did was push the consequences of this disaster back a few months so it would be after the more recent election.