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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.
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.
As many people as possible are trying to die in order to avoid having to choose between Trump and Clinton. Ironically, more dead people than ever are voting.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The stresses related to being poor.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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.
"puppet socialist hellpits" What? You mean places like the USA? "SHOW YOUR PAPERS, CITIZEN!"
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?
Obamacare just dumped 15 million people into the medical system who were not there before 2010.
So you're saying had these 15 million people not been given access to medical services, more of them would still be alive now? ie Better medical services killed them?
Because that sounds like what your saying, and it sounds a whole lot of crazy.
I'll let you guess which outcome capitalism would favor more. Hint: It's probably the one that generates a higher death rate.
So the "socialist" system is killing people, but a "capitalist" system also prefers to kill people too? Under a managed system, either socialist or capitalist, a living person generates more income to the state than a dead one. So this all sounds a bit whacko...
Finally! I really thought this thread would get by without someone coughing "Obamacare" into it.
But I have to admit, your reason why giving people who didn't have medical insurance one should lead to more deaths is at least creative. Dumb, but creative.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
USA! USA! USA!
The thing about making absolute statements is that it only takes a single counter-example to absolutely disprove them. So here you go.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
But it's not Andalusia of today that is interesting, it's Andalusia as it existed between 1920 and 1939. Andalusia the land of plenty while the rest of the world were living in the great depression. Absolutely socialist and completely anarchist - had no government whatsoever (let alone a totalitarian one). Orwell fought on their side in the Spanish civil war - he called Andalusia the closest thing to a Utopian society that has ever existed. A society that had no poverty, starvation or suffering at all - and more personal liberty than any other in history before or since.
That pissed off everybody else - nobody liked to see people governing themselves, without poverty or hunger, in a functioning industrial society. Other country's citizens may get ideas... so they faced a two-front war. Capitalist and communists (they may despise each other but not nearly as much as they despised anarcho-soialists. The Capitalists hated both the anarchism and the socialism and the communists REALLY hated the idea of a working socialism without an autocratic state) actually formed an alliance to wipe Andalusia off the map and after almost 2 decades they finally overwhelmed them.
But economically, politically and socially it was an astoundingly successful society. Democracy's greatest success. Unfortunately nobody can stand forever against a sustained war on two fronts by extremely powerful forces, even so it took two decades to defeat them.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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!
The problem is not political talent, but the ability to rule wisely and well. Our institutions, unfortunately, do not optimize for selection of a person with that skill set. And our press and population are, unfortunately, more interested in outrageous stories that generate lots of clicks and outrage than they are in reasonable discussions of issues which would recognize the interests of stakeholders and strive to develop meaningful plans.
Most people probably do not encounter a single meaningful expert panel discussion on any policy issue even once in their lives. Our presidential debates are like children throwing sand in the sandbox when held against those.
Real lawyers write in C++
If you look at the components of the increase, it does not look much like an obesity epidemic. There are increases in suicide, Alzheimer's, gun deaths (probably because of suicides), and opioid overdoses. Most of the increase was among whites, especially white women, but whites have a slightly lower obesity rate than most other racial categories in the US.
It is easy, but probably wrong, to blame this on people's bad eating habits.
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.
Which is why I find is so suspicious that the post ridiculously and spuriously includes this bias-ridden sentence:
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 to be 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.'"
"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.
I doubt it. That kind of violence is a tragedy we should try to prevent, but constitutes a tiny fraction of all deaths. Gun homicides are only roughly a third of gun deaths, and firearm deaths are about 1.5% of all deaths. So the 11% increase in murders (in the ten largest US cities, according to your DailySignal link) represents some fraction of 0.35 deaths per 100,000 people -- no more than 5% of the increase in death rate, and perhaps negated by reductions in other causes of death. Again, we shouldn't ignore those deaths, but they're not a driving factor in the increase here.
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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>You can't be socialist and anarchist.
Yes you can, and many socialists would argue you cannot be a true socialist and NOT be anarchist.
>The definition of socialism is state ownership of the means of production.
No it isn't. Who told you that ? The definition of socialism is WORKER ownership of the means of production. There is NOTHING in there about a "state". The idea of the state as a proxy for workers was introduced by Bolshevism but all the other forms roundly reject that. Worker-owned co-ops are socialist businesses. A country becomes socialist when the majority of workers own the businesses they work in. Argentina is technically the most socialist country in the world today since worker-owned coops are now by far the largest form of employment there (and the absolutely backbone of the economy contributing well over 80% of total GDP). Many anarchists reject the idea off a boss/worker relationship as being an unacceptable power-relationship - and find only socialist businesses compatible with anarchism. Many such socialists believe the idea of a government or state is an unacceptable power relationship and believe they should have a say in every vote they are expected to live under, just as they should have an equal say in every company decision that affects their livelilhood and an equal share in the profits they helped create.
>What you are talking about is a social anarchy.
It's had many names, anarcho-socialism, social anarchy, libertarian-socialism, left-libertarianism, anarcho-syndicalism, participatory politics and participatory economics are all essentially the same set of ideas. They have very minor differences in how they propose to handle specific aspects of implementation but the key features of all of them are exactly the same.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *