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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.
This kind of arbitrary date picking cause and effect game also works great with the economy! Try it at home, kids!
"Old man yells at systemd"
80 Americans were killed in terrorist attacks from 2004 to 2013. the US defense budget in 2015 was 637 billion dollars. However, The US Health and Human Services budget for 2015 is 1.3 trillion dollars. How is it we as a nation can outspend ourselves as the largest military power in the world, and still be faced with a declining life expectency rate?
Good people go to bed earlier.
Considering one of the major contributers is "unintentional injury deaths, such as overdoses and car accidents, increased by 6.7 percent" much of the blame likely sits on the pain pill problem. Cancer deaths actually went down, so health care is working for that disease. Alzheimers deaths rose a lot... but they say this is due to the medical establishment just recategorizing that as a cause of death... woner what those were usually listed under.
The ars article has some useful charts, if, unlike 3 out of 5 of trump supporters, you know how to read them.
Someone had to do it.
Subsidies just drive up prices. What we need is to do away with insurance completely, make people pay for their own health care. Then you'll see how people start actually looking at their bills and questioning prices. When that happens there will be an end to hospitals charging $100 an aspirin and the other medical nonsense that we have now.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Give people quality healthcare and they'll live longer.
The disturbing part is not the fact that longevity is in decline.
The disturbing part is the likelihood that it is by design.
Every government has a responsibility of resource management, and when a population continues to increase, policies and procedures must be put in place to help execute that responsibility.
If you take a look at our policies and legal products, it paints quite an alarming picture. Tobacco is a legal product. From a health perspective, it makes absolutely zero fucking sense, as it kills 450,000 Americans every year, while providing zero benefit for a human body.
That said, it is a legal product because it kills 450,000 Americans every year. It also is a leading cause of cancer, so government also gets the benefit of ticking off the "creates jobs" box with all of the related diseases caused by tobacco, namely the highly-profitable Cancer Industrial Complex. You really believe we're searching for a cure to eradicate an industry that generates well over $100 billion a year in profits, along with the twisted side benefit of population control? Think again.
And tobacco is but one example of resource management. Think marijuana is still considered "deadly" per DEA Schedule standards? Hardly. It's not legal because it's not deadly enough to benefit resource management. It also helps fund the War on Drugs, creates thousands of jobs in the DEA, and feeds the Privatized Prison Complex. The only downside is we've earned the illustrious moniker of The Incarcerated States of America, but clearly maintaining an illegal status is worth it.
Big Pharma has legalized the opium den in quite an elegant and profitable way, creating addicts, jobs, and deaths. And every study says HFCS is bad for you? Yup, let's ensure we put that shit in as many food products as possible while minimizing health risks. Carcinogens in makeup? Sure, why not. All examples of policy feeding the resource management responsibility.
TL; DR - Death is by design, backed by policy, because every government has a responsibility of resource management.
You realize how fucking asinine that opinion is, right?
You're saying that all these racist white people voted for Obama, because they.. Hated black people more back then?
Obama derangement syndrome was real, but Trump derangement is an order of magnitude worse. In 2008 Obama just had to deal with occasional rumors about his birthplace and whatever remnants of open white supremacy still exist in the 21st century, not a year-long media campaign with open, unabashed attempts to portray him as a literal fascist and the second coming of Hitler. Every president gets compared to Hitler of course, but usually by random nutjobs, not major MSM outlets.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/mainstream-media-scream-cnn-compares-trump-to-hitler-stalin/article/2604155
http://www.wnd.com/2016/10/5-washington-post-writers-liken-trump-to-hitler/
etc.
BTW that voice in your head right now saying "Well that's different, Trump really is Hitler"? That's the TDS talking.
Then of course there is the constant effort to label Trump and everyone associated with him with every "-ism" they can think of. Freaking Ben Carson is a white supremacist; Steve Bannon is a nazi because Breitbart supports confederate flags and Bannon may or may not have said something weakly anti-semitic in a private conversation 20+ years ago; Trump voters are all KKKers because one attention whore neonazi threw a rally attended by more reporters than people and declared himself king of the alt-right.
(Oh yeah, and then there's this thread blaming him for shit happening before he's even in office. And wasn't Obamacare specifically supposed to do the opposite of things like this?)
In the US, infant mortality generally includes any death of a human being (who is not intentionally aborted) from the time that human is "viable" but still inside its mom.
In much of the rest of the world (it varies by country) a child's death is not recorded as such if it has not reached some number of days, weeks, or even months after being born. Therefore, a child who dies from complications during child birth in the US would be added to the US infant mortality rate, but the same child dying the same way in many other nations would NOT be so recorded. This is how many governments make themselves look better, by monkeying with the stats instead of actually improving things.
That old infant mortality stat as a comparison of healthcare quality has been debunked many times, but it does not stop propagandists from using it.
Let me give you a better comparison re the US and Cuba: When Michael Moore (the sloppy-dressing millionaire guy who made the film "Sicko" praising Castro's heathcare system and probably influenced YOU to think Cuba's system is good) recently had a health crisis he did NOT go to Cuba for care..... he ran straight to one of those obviously inferior American hospitals. hmmmmmmm