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US Life Expectancy Declines For the First Time Since 1993 (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Washington Post: For the first time in more than two decades, life expectancy for Americans declined last year (Warning: may be paywalled; alternate source) -- a troubling development linked to a panoply of worsening health problems in the United States. Rising fatalities from heart disease and stroke, diabetes, drug overdoses, accidents and other conditions caused the lower life expectancy revealed in a report released Thursday by the National Center for Health Statistics. In all, death rates rose for eight of the top 10 leading causes of death. The new report raises the possibility that major illnesses may be eroding prospects for an even wider group of Americans. Its findings show increases in "virtually every cause of death. It's all ages," said David Weir, director of the health and retirement study at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. Over the past five years, he noted, improvements in death rates were among the smallest of the past four decades. "There's this just across-the-board [phenomenon] of not doing very well in the United States." Overall, life expectancy fell by one-tenth of a year, from 78.9 in 2014 to 78.8 in 2015, according to the latest data. The last time U.S. life expectancy at birth declined was in 1993, when it dropped from 75.6 to 75.4, according to World Bank data. The overall death rate rose 1.2 percent in 2015, its first uptick since 1999. More than 2.7 million people died, about 45 percent of them from heart disease or cancer.
It's sure to drop further once he repeals health care.
Government doesn't care about ordinary Americans. So government spending doesn't help ordinary Americans live longer, better lives. Only insiders benefit. The rest of us bear the burden.
TFA links to some summaries, but some of the categories (particular deaths due to accidents) are aggravatingly unspecific. Alzheimer's and accidents (unintentional injuries) had the largest year-over-year increases, at +4.0 and +2.7 deaths per 100,000. The other causes were all +1.5 or less. The increase in these two exceeded the increases in all the other top-10 combined.
I'm really curious to see what the breakdown for unintentional injury deaths looks like for 2015. We're in the middle of a prescription painkiller addiction epidemic which is going largely unreported by the media. Two years ago, overdoses displaced motor vehicle accidents as the leading cause of accidental death - a position it had held for over a half century. This year we lost more famous people to overdoses than to gun violence, even though the media spent a vastly disproportionate amount of time focusing on the latter. The day of the UCLA shooting (1 murder, 1 suicide), there was a synthetic drug poisoning incident at a concert in Florida which killed 2 and sent 60 to the hospital. But the media concentrated almost entirely on the UCLA shooting.
For the plebs, it's been dropping. Reason #2458 why raising the age for SS or Medicare is fascist BS.
What kind of fake news are you smoking? healthgrad.com ? lol
of course there screwed...
Get up!
If they think it's bad now, just wait 'til Herr Trump gets those immigrant "recreation camps" open with the "community showers".
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
A reasonable person would reject spending on the prevention of statistically unlikely causes of death (like terrorism). A reasonable person has no problem spending on probable causes of early death, especially when such spending saves money long term (like literally every other Western public health system).
Then take Cuba out and look at all the other countries that beat you on this score. Are they all faking their numbers, too?
And duly noted, that apparently drug addict prostitutes don't really count for you.
Nope. You're just confused because you think "paying for" and "actually running" are the same thing.
That's not entirely your own fault though, they keep naming things poorly. It's even called healthcare reform when the vast majority of it was insurance company regulations.
I would imagine Alzheimers deaths were categorized as "old age" or something similar. I think it's a relatively recent realization that while many people develop mental problems as they get older, this is not an absolute certainty and often there is a disease involved (so they blame the disease instead of just "that's the way people age").
Oh, also we might be getting better at looking after the various illnesses and problems that come more easily with Alzheimers, so that instead of dying of pneumonia / flu / breaking a hip (and the subsequent physical downward slide) / etc, people are living long enough with the disease that it gets to the truly critical systems (breathing and such), where it can be the primary cause of death instead of just an invitation for a different cause of death.
Causes of death are often complex, especially in older people, who may be suffering from a variety of issues simultaneously. Nonetheless, one underlying cause should not be overlooked: increasing obesity in the US drives a lot of other health issues.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Fact: Under Obama care, life expectancy declines. In addition, there are many news articles detailing how coverage cost as gone way up and services have gone down.
Conclusion: It is trumps fault.
You sir, are the stuff retards are made of.
Only 80 killed in 10 years, sounds like the defense was working for the most part.
The problem with healthcare is there is no ceiling to the cost and the end result is always the same, everyone dies eventually. Most of the early deaths appear to be lifestyle related anyway. Any reasonable person should prefer money to be spent on preventing unnecessary deaths (like terrorism) and just take care of themselves better to handle the longevity part.
The US now has 10 aircraft carriers, 2 under construction, and 1 planned. (source)
Military spending is 54% of our national budget, which is more than the amount of our deficit. More than the combined spending of the next seven countries.
What was that you were saying about spending ceilings?
Oh it did, it's just that white folks ignored it or assumed it was justified. And they would've gotten away with it too if it hadn't been for those pesky cellphones.
Looking at the data, things like obesity, motor vehicle accidents and gun violence are contributors.
Resource management is a responsibility of our government, so death is by design and backed by policy.
That said, you want to bring gun violence as a factor here, when over 60% of those deaths were caused by suicide. An often overlooked component of gun violence statistics to avoid funding mental health for some reason while making the 2nd Amendment a political talking point. Tobacco kills over 450,000 Americans every year, which makes motor vehicles look like a minor nuisance by comparison, but hey let's not ever talk about making tobacco illegal. After all, it helps feed the responsibility of resource management tremendously.
If a company's products cause illness, won't they loose any class action suit and have to pay millions? Don't they break the law by knowingly selling products that cause illness? I would think so.
How many decades did it take to finally bring tobacco companies under control? the truth is that we still haven't despite the science. food companies are using the same tactics of doubt to delay this fight and make as much money as they can while millions die.
You don't want to prevent illness and death in the first place by adequate consumer protection laws and their enforcement?
As long as we're making magical wishes, why don't we wish for bad people to not be bad. In the meantime, it's best to attack problems using the most effective methods.
A company can just kill a few customers here and there if they can get away with it financially? Only in the US can someone come up with such an idea...
A few people? They are killing millions of people and getting away with it because it's difficult to prove because it's the extended use of their product that kills. Therefore, it only makes sense to make it so that their actions catch up with them, even if it takes 40 years to manifest heart disease.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.