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US Life Expectancy Can Vary By 20 Years Depending On Where You Live (npr.org)
After analyzing records from every U.S. county between 1980 and 2014, Christopher Murray, head of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, and his team found that life expectancy can vary by more than 20 years from county to county. "In counties with the longest lifespans, people tended to live about 87 years, while people in places with the shortest lifespans typically made it only about 67," reports NPR. From the report: The discrepancy is equivalent to the difference between the low-income parts of the developing world and countries with high incomes, Murray notes. For example, it's about the same gap as the difference between people living in Japan, which is among countries with the longest lifespans, and India, which has one of the shortest, Murray says. The U.S. counties with the longest life expectancy are places like Marin County, Calif., and Summit County, Colo. -- communities that are well-off and more highly educated. Counties with the shortest life expectancy tend to have communities that are poorer and less educated. The lowest is in Oglala Lakota County, S.D., which includes the Pine Ridge Native American reservation. Many of the other counties with the lowest life expectancy are clustered along the lower Mississippi River Valley as well as parts of West Virginia and Kentucky, according to the analysis. There's no sign of the gap closing. In fact, it's appears to be widening. Between 1980 and 2014, the gap between the highest and lowest lifespans increased by about two years. The reasons for the gap are complicated. But it looks like the counties with the lowest lifespans haven't made much progress fighting significant health problems such as smoking and obesity. The study has been published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.
You can have progressive taxation and universal healthcare or increasing inequality and more illness, fear, death and guns. Your choice.
Those three things are often correlated, so causation may be falsely determined.
I.E. theoretically it could be (but isn't) that genetically the natives are subject to major diseases that reduce life expectancy.
Or, (almost as unlikely), that area could be infectred by a nasty disease.
Or most likely, it is a matter of money and education, both of which has been systematically denied to the members of the lower class that predominate in that area.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
It's a reasonable bet that the people with lower life expectancy are probably not voting progressive. They have less money, worse jobs and lower life expectancy. They don't see progressive solutions as being in their service. At best progressives will lecture them about how their jobs aren't coming back, they should learn to code, go to university, and move to the rich enclaves on the coasts. Not that conservatives are any better, but conservatives figure out that it's better to pretend to listen, rather than to lecture those with less money, worse jobs and lower life expectancy on how they are all privileged transphobic racists and deserve their lot because of it.
That's right, Mr. Wizard. The only alternative to the US is Venezuela.
Be sure not to compare US health to Europe, because your fairy tale about lowering rich people's taxes won't quite hold water, though.
I don't respond to AC's.
"You had me disable AdBlock for this? It is not by Forbes â" they simply cite a survey by Commonwealth Fund â" an Illiberal organization currently headed by one Dr. Blumenthal, who has "chief health advisor to the Dukakis campaign" on his resume.
Seriously?"
Ad hominem is a logical fallacy for precisely this reason - because you don't like the fact that statistics show that developed European countries all do better than the US in terms of life expectancy you're instead attacking the person who did the study.
But that's not how statistics work - the numbers don't lie, take it from this guy, take it from any other, attacking this individual doesn't change the fact that life expectancy in Europe was higher.
I actually followed this thread because I was genuinely intrigued to see where you were going to take the life expectancy argument (because I was already aware it was higher in most European countries, and that you were hence on a losing bet by trying to make that argument). I'm disappointed to see that you've simply decided to deny reality though rather than accept the fact that you were wrong. That doesn't bode well for you as a human being.
What about the CIA?
https://www.cia.gov/library/pu...
Or are they too liberal for you too?
You can't ask someone not to hate you when you're being willfully ignorant, because that highlights you as someone that isn't willing to learn and that's more interested in lying to themselves than having an adult conversation where things like facts actually matter.
I'm curious, do you favour health insurance for just the healthy and wealthy (i.e. those that don't need it) or do you think you should have single-payer and the half-arsedness of the ACA was the problem?
... dare I say "fake news" ...
Well, you just did, didn't you? However, since the howler-monkeys of the alt-right (or -wrong, perhaps?) yell that at every turn of the road, it has become little more than another swear word, so if you want to contribute genuinely to an intelligent discussion (and I think you do), another term might help your argument being taken serious.
I personally lost all access to medical care under Obamacare.
I'm guessing you're not part of a minority.
They could, technically, 'leave anytime,' sure. And be homeless somewhere. Most of them are unemployable; after all, they have a big black mark on their resumes: they've been living all their lives, unemployed, on the most high-crime res in the region. Would you hire someone with that resume?
It's very hard to get out of a ghetto situation. Not only are they undereducated, but they have no opportunity to find work. It's hard to get a new home elsewhere when you've only ever known the res, and don't have the opportunity for work elsewhere. It's a rotten situation up one side, and down the other.
First off, you're wrong. They receive very little (a couple hundred/month if they enroll in a special welfare program. That's it.) In the 90s, the government built a bunch of houses, and moved everyone into odd little communities. Those have seen fallen into states of disrepair, as nobody could afford to live in them; lipstick on a pig and all that. They need education above all else.
But more to the point, I never said they needed Federal aid. As a libertarian, I believe strongly in private aid organizations (my favorite charity is a particular homeless shelter which is completely privately funded.)
Have you ever been on the Pine Ridge Res? If not, you have no idea what life there is like. I have traveled the western half of the USA, and have never seen a res as depressing and dismal as this. Even the Rosebud reservation, just a couple hours to the East, is substantially better. But if you recall in your history books, the Sioux, specifically the Oglala Lakota, were despised for their refusal to surrender to the USA. They're the tribe that ambushed Gen. Custer. They've never been seen as equals with the rest of America, and the bad situation 100 years ago has lead to the bad situation they live in today.
If people weren't so collectively stupid / selfish they might even see it as a stepping stone to something better again. Unfortunately people are too stupid / selfish and don't see the bigger picture.
They are US citizens and they can leave anytime. Furthermore, poverty is not a barrier to picking up and leaving. What's actually going on is that people with initiative and skills do leave the reservations and join mainstream society. That leaves behind the people who are incapable of leaving because they lack the skills, intelligence, or initiative. And that's what you're seeing.
The trouble is, you've described about 95% of all humans. Forcibly dumping people into a shithole and then expecting them to show levels of initiative and risk taking well above what's average is going to leave you with an awful lot of people in a shithole.
And blaming them is simply trying to absolve responsibility from the people who did the dumping.
Instructing a group of people to be better humans than average is not a thing that will solve any problems.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Well you watched Obama "fix" it and nothing changed for these poor people.
I'd say all we proved is that government is incapable of fixing anything.
I halfway agree in that I think the ACA did not do enough. Roughly 20 million people gained medical coverage of some kind. Given that a significant part of this study revealed healthcare as a contributing factor, I wouldn't be suprised if tens of thousands of lives were saved. The real problem is we need a single payer system like the rest of the developed world, where we would pay about half as much to insure everyone while getting superior medical outcomes. Even trump agrees.