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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.
The stresses related to being poor.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Sure, U6 is dismal, but that doesn't define a depression. The trick there is that BLS keeps redefining "the basket" of goods for the CPI calculation. The CPI doesn't go up because while the price of beef has tripled, the price of LCD TV's has fallen by 10x, so the BLS considers that to even out (I kid you not)
Holy cow, I was looking at refrigerator prices the other day. I last bought a top-of-the-line unit (no icemaker because I'm not insane, but otherwise high-end) in 2002. The prices today are more than triple for a similar level of product. Very few people's incomes have moved at all since 2006, and not too much before that.
Anyway, with the inflation numbers properly considered, GDP has been shrinking, not growing since the Crash. The growth is only in nominal terms, with diminished dollars, not in hamburger-buying dollars. The BLS's job now is to keep the economic picture bright for the politicians. The website shadowstats.com runs all the numbers the old way and the new way, for people to inspect.
And two quarters of negative growth gives you a recession, and [mumble] years of negative growth gives you a depression. Welcome to a big one.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Too many fucking fatties jamming as much lard in their faces as they can.
730 vs 723 is not even 1%. The thing is, thanks to medical progresses mainly (and food supply...) life expectancy tended to get longer, i.e. a whole generation (seniors) who would have died earlier otherwise, is given a few years more. But everyone dies eventually, and we are maybe just witnessing the "older generation who was the first to benefit from those progresses" starting to die.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
"She lost the will to live."
While that may sound mawkish, isn't it possible that many more folk are falling into depression, given the long-term downturn in the economy, the bleakness of the foreseeable future, and just a sense of "Man, nothing we can do will fix this?"
I'm sure I'm projecting a bit here, but... I'm also sure a lot of y'all are thinking exactly the same thing. There's an ugly mood about America right now, and the media and politicos are trying to paper it over.. but it's there. The numbers are lying. We're not as well as they tell us we are. To me it feels like the mid to late 70's did. Ugh, that was ugly. I was 10 going into 1980, and I could sense it was ugly.
So what I'm saying is.. maybe more people are dying off because things have been rotten for a couple of decades, and there's no end in sight?
Could just be me, though. I'm a pessimist by nature and by training. Meteorology and then IT? Yeah. Expect the worst, always =o)
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Look at the labor participation rate, not the widely reported unemployment figure. The participation rate is dismal and reflects a lot of white, working class men who don't fit into the modern work force.
I don't think that's it at all. Two very close relatives of mine had decent paying jobs when they committed suicide, and hell I've thought about it myself plenty of times, and even thought about how exactly I'd carry it out a few times. Right now the income I make is a LOT for just one person, I don't have any debt, flawless credit, and no drug addictions of any kind. Yet I'm really not happy with life at all. Why? Couldn't say, to be honest. Tried lots of different meds and therapy, and nothing has worked.
Most people in my state won't even talk about it because it's so stigmatized; instead what happens is you'll just find their body one day. In fact enough to the point that I won't mention it in public and am posting anonymously.
Yeah I think this is by far the biggest "douche vs turd" election I've ever witnessed, and I can't even fathom how it could possibly get even worse than this. Seriously, this year politics in America has probably hit rock bottom.
As opposed to the black or hispanic working class men, who are doing wonderful, right?
Yes, that is right. Blacks and Hispanic men are doing relatively better. They still aren't doing as well as whites, but their economic conditions have been improving, while working class white men have been stagnating. This explains why blacks and Hispanics are more likely to support Hillary Clinton, the "status quo" candidate. The status quo is actually working pretty well for them.
Too late. People believe only the first thing they read or something that its into their belief system.
The people, especially whites, are being punished for the failed social doctrine to which they have been subject. They are too hard to please; they need more resources to do work than immigrants from the third world. They expect a quality of life that "they don't deserve" according to our leaders and people who don't have any real problems in their lives in general ("they're not me so fuck them" syndrome).
The situation boils down to the simple fact that we have incompetent leaders that are incapable of mobilizing our human resources because they live in a bubble and can't relate to anything they don't have first-hand experience in, which is not much. They are used to having people do all of that for them, but their social doctrine has seen that all of those people have disappeared.
They've milked the cow too dry: the worst aspect is that the world wars damaged the population severely by disrupting the traditional transference of knowledge, habit, and experience; too many kids grew up without fathers and the media failed to pick up the pieces.
If throwing money at the problem by making an exaggerated effort to solve it with whatever devices happen to be lying around doesn't work immediately, as was the case with the media, our leaders find the problem to be impossibly difficult to solve. The quality of true innovation has escaped them from generation after generation of soft living; they completely rely on others that they can entice with wealth to do everything for them. They have inherited a system that they very barely can keep track of and have completely forgotten how it was made. They have lost the characteristics that allowed their ancestors to make it to begin with.
If they can't solve the puzzle, then, like the spoiled rotten idiot children they are, they start attacking it. See: the recent "recession". It is simply the rich robbing everyone who isn't working in the industries with the most growth. Squeezing people dry until there's nothing left to shed but their very lives. This ensures that people are living day-to-day and cannot organize to do something to help themselves (against their leaders' interests), like enact a revolution (like the German Third Reich).
Maybe the reason is that the USAians are working harder and longer than before, and because of the always-present stress about making ends meet.
Perhaps some unions or welfare system would be nice to have?
Yeah I think this is by far the biggest "douche vs turd" election I've ever witnessed, and I can't even fathom how it could possibly get even worse than this. Seriously, this year politics in America has probably hit rock bottom.
If I may speak for a second on behalf of everyone in the rest of the world...
America, you have just shy of 325 million residents. I don't know how many of those are natural-born residents eligible to run for US President, but I assume the percentage is fairly high. Let's say at least 275 million people. How is it that from such a huge number that these are the best people you could come up with???
You guys really need to dig deeper for political talent. We in the outside world are getting worried about you if the current crop of clowns is the best you can find!
Yaz
Why is the parent modded as "insightful"? It's full of bullshit.
The parent didn't articulate his point as well as he might have, choosing a poor example with the price of food. However, even with the commodity example he's not wholly wrong. In the decades since 1978, increases in productivity in the US economy have gone overwhelmingly to the top income quintile and since the Great Recession of 2008, which accelerated these trends, to the top 10% and top 1% respectively. Wages have stagnated as generations of ordinary working people have shared little in these gains for 37+ years now. Moreover, the cost of key goods which many middle class people buy, including health care and college education, have skyrocketed. The result is a shrinking middle class which feels increasingly pressured, squeezed and pinched by high costs and incomes that haven't kept up, even though multiple family members are working harder and more hours than ever before. You cannot deny that this is an issue, the evidence is overwhelming. Indeed, all of the 2016 presidential candidates are talking about it. They may disagree on what to do about it or how to fix it, but almost nobody questions the existence of the problem.
You already know that the data you are relying on for the consumer price index is not the actual price consumers pay.
It really doesn't matter if the "cattle weight normalized price" is changing at one rate or another if the actual prices that actual people pay is growing at a much higher rate.
Not that easy. Out of 275 citizens how many can afford a political campaign?
If you are not rich or have backing of the rich, you don't count.
You can not. There's no such data. And it looks like you're the prime reason for the article - it's just another step for the cognitive dissonance to become unbearable and cause a suicide.
Really? So you're saying that the $6lbs for ground beef isn't really $6, or are you saying that wages haven't decreased(in the US on average by $3-5k in the last 6-7 years) and in turn it's all just a figment of imagination.
Let me give you some help: You've seen food, energy, general goods all increase. You make the statement that this is simply due to inflation, as a reminder inflation isn't calculated against all items in an economy(hint: most of those data sets are using the "core inflation number"). Food for instance isn't calculated in that metric. On top of that, in the US wages have decreased in the last 7 years between $3-8k depending on where you live. That means people are bringing in less money and paying more for food.
Om, nomnomnom...
How is it that from such a huge number that these are the best people you could come up with???
We didn't come up with them. This is being done to us, not for us or by us.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Speaking of biased writing...
No mention was made of whether the cutover to Obamacare might have had some effect.
Equally, a less Obamacare-dead-horse-beating person could have written, "No mention was made of whether the disastrous foreign policy blunders of George W Bush or the unprecedented obstructionist Congress-paralyzing politics of Mitch McConnell had some effect."
LOL
Although maybe I am being too quick to say that the above are all equally preposterous to mention as having had no effect. Because in fact, I can imagine a reasonable argument being made that expanding medical coverage to include millions of Americans who previously had no insurance could quite likely have led to a REDUCTION IN THE DEATH RATE such that without the introduction of Obamacare the rise would have been larger.
So you're saying had these 15 million people not been given access to medical services, more of them would still be alive now?
No. Had those 15 million people not been given access to medical services, more other people would still be alive now. The system already couldn't handle the strain of the patient load, which has been increased without increasing the number of medical professionals sufficiently or even substantially, thanks to the AMA.
Also, medical misprescription is one of the biggest killers in America. It's in the top three. It's grossly underreported because if your doc fucks up and stops your heart with a bad drug combo it's most likely to be reported as a heart attack and stop there. They don't have time to get your prescription right, they certainly don't have time to figure out what killed you.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So when do the armed people take to the streets and use their guns to take back power?
After missing three meals.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"Not sure why" is hilarious. When Sarah Palin became the first major politician to use twitter, the Democrats laughed at her. When she said that Putin, if not thwarted, may eye invading Ukraine, they laughed at her. When she said she didn't read any one newspaper for her news (as anyone who looks at news aggregators doesn't), they laughed at her. When she said Obamacare would destroy the quality (not access, but quality) of medical care in this country, they ridiculed her. Well, keep laughing, ass holes.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Ah yes, the Trump voters.
Yeah, they are going to be a problem until we find something to do with unskilled labor.
If you don't know why you aren't happy, then change.
Nothing like a person who knows nothing about depression giving medical advice.
Like telling a dead person to "walk it off".
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Pre-Obamacare single adults couldn't get on Medicare regardless of income. I have two friends with medical conditions that prevent them from working who used to carry around the letter telling them they were denied because they got tired of folks like you convinced that it was somehow their fault they didn't have the medicine they needed to stay alive. Telling yourself Medicare was taking care of these people might make you feel better but it doesn't make it true.
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Or you can be like Bernie. Fuck, for once, there is a worthy, honest candidate, who really stands by his principles, who is not in a pocket of any corporations, who has a long history of doing the right thing, instead of going with the popular opinion of the time, and a lot of experience with politics. And he is still losing to Hillary because of the rigged democratic party (superdelegates) and a perceived "socialist" boogieman bullshit.