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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.
"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.
... everyone dies eventually, and we are maybe just witnessing the "older generation who was the first to benefit from those progresses" starting to die.
But the death rate within each age group went up. Ageing population was already corrected for.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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?
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.
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.'"
I know more people who have lost their healthcare as a result of Obamacare than who have gotten health care who did not have it before. Then again, I know more working class folks than non-working who can get the biggest subsidies.
That's just anecdotal of course.
Less anecdotal is that health care costs have risen considerably, and that even if one has insurance under Obamacare, the cost of getting sick is high (look at deductables and out-of-pocket maximums of the various tiers).
Not to mention the high number of people who have subsidised coverage, but with deductibles so high that it is the benefit is unusable.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
"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.
Obamacare hasn't helped anyone. The "millions of poor people" who supposedly benefited from it qualified for medicaid to begin with. The only thing this disastrous plan has done is drive up the cost for those of us who actually have to pay for it out of pocket and force people who decided that they can't afford it to pay out the nose anyway. Do you remember when Obama was running for President and we were all shouting how he didn't have the experience he would need to properly pass a bill through congress? This is exactly what we were talking about. Anyone with a modicum of foresight would have expanded the program that was already in place to help these people instead of managing to screw things up worse then they were.
Obamacare hasn't helped anyone. The "millions of poor people" who supposedly benefited from it qualified for medicaid to begin with.
Doesn't mean they got it. One of the big things Obamacare did was expand medicaid so those people that qualified actually received healthcare. Everyone's beef was using the individual mandate to make it happen (ask congress for $100B to give more poor people insurance? yeah that would have worked out so much better). Sure it needs some work but its not like everything was roses under the status quo. I assume you're firmly dug in to your opinion on it but if you look at some of the data that is rolling in, Obamacare has largely done what it set out to do, which is get more people health insurance (+30M so far). Plenty of anecdotes abound about financial ruin...just as there were before Obamacare but none of the disaster scenarios have come true or even seem plausible anymore.
Also, I don't think any candidate would have had the experience to deal with a historically antagonistic congress like Obama did for 8 years. Hell, democrats even voted for Bush and cheney's war.
Anyway, I don't expect you to give this post any credence but maybe lighten up a bit and don't deal so much in absolutes. Life is generally more complicated than goodthing/badthing.
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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Another anecdote: I have a rare and very serious autoimmune disease called Poly Arteritis Nodosa. I lost my health insurance after the Maryland high risk insurance program was transferred to CareFirst. They "lost" all the records from the previous management company and failed to renew my insurance. Once I lost my insurance I had a "preexisting condition" and was ineligible for coverage. Unfortunately Federal law makes it nearly impossible to sue a health insurance company. Even if they commit outright fraud, even if their actions cost you hour life, you have little recourse.
Remicade cost about $90k per year so I had to take out a home equity loan to pay my medical bills. After I blew through my savings I lost access to medication I desperately needed. Multiple visits to the Maryland State House and television interviews were not sufficient to get CareFirst to remedy their error.
I am alive today for two reasons. The first is that Abbot Labs provided me with Humira for free. Thanks to the drug company's donation my doctors were able to stop the progression of the disease. Ultimately I did regain the use of my left arm and partial use of my vocal chords. I have since lost the use of my left shoulder but it has minimal impact on my ability to function.
The second reason I'm alive is due to the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The ACA required insurance companies to accept patients with pre-existing conditions. I have since been able to get coverage and have kept the disease in remission. In fact, I just got the good news that the disease is in complete remission and for the time being I no longer need to take any medications to control it.
Now on to evidence that is not anecdotal. Many people don't know that, or if, they are benefiting from the ACA. Health expenditure per capita in the US as of 2013 was $9000 per person. For a single person that's $9k. For a family of three that's $27k. I pay about $6k per year and I'm grateful for the subsidy I receive. How many people, how many family's are paying their share?
The cost of health insurance does continue to rise. But since the reform act it has risen at a slower pace than it did before the reform. Between 2000 and 2010 the cost of coverage rose on average by 7.1 percent. Between 2010 and 2014 it rose by 5.2 percent. In 2015 it rose by 4.2 percent. When you consider those cost increases you should also consider that a lot of very sick people are getting treatment today.
Personally I had misgivings about the ACA. I had concerns that reform would reduce incentive for pharmaceutical companies to develop new drugs. I also had concern that the ACA was so complex that it would collapse. Health finance companies simply act as a middle man taking a cut of every transaction. If you're going to reform I think the financial management of health care should be nationalized. But so for the ACA has not collapsed. Millions of people are getting medical care who did not have access before 2010.
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
To be fair, Congress gutted what was a good bill. Obama lacked the testicular fortitude to not sign what Congress handed back to him of his bill, so it's still his fault we're stuck with it; but the bill he handed Congress was good.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.