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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.
I'm sure the new republican health care plan will provide more comprehensive coverage at much lower costs thus solving americas poor living in third world conditions. /s
You can have progressive taxation and universal healthcare or increasing inequality and more illness, fear, death and guns. Your choice.
Yeah, heaven forbid somebody explain to a coal miner that he can find steady work deploying clean energy projects, and will actually be alive to see their child graduate from high school without the aid of portable oxygen...
I live adjacent to the Oglala Lakota Reservation. It's a massive ghetto. I'm not surprised in the least that the expected lifespan is so short -- in fact, I'm kinda surprised it's that long. The poverty here is worse than most people realize exists in America. The hardest part is that there's literally no industry for these people to use as a means to climb out of poverty. They receive enough allowance from the government to stay alive -- and that's it.
I'm not a native (heck, my dad wasn't even born in this country), but I feel deeply for our fellow men & women on the res. The USA forced them to live there, forced them into the ghetto -- and now they're too impoverished to ever leave. There's no work, no hope -- the res is the most depressing place imaginable. The lifespan information should be used as an indicator of how badly communities need help.
I'm sure the new republican health care plan will provide more comprehensive coverage at much lower costs thus solving americas poor living in third world conditions. /s
For those who want a good visualization, here is the US map of the study results,
and here's the study, click on the "figures and tables" link in the overly complex mishmash of a web page for visualizations and caption explanations.
Can they? Do the skills transfer that easily? Are there sufficient clean energy projects in the areas where coal minors are located? Do these jobs pay as well, given that at least some coal minors have union jobs?
I'm not a Republican but I do agree that progressives have not adequately addressed the problems these workers face. I don't think the Democrats wanted to admit that there are losers in the transition to clean energy other than big bad fossil fuel companies.
Nor do a I believe that Trump has any real solutions for the majority of blue color workers. In fact I see very little hope for that group of people, - not because of clean energy, immigration, or manufacturing leaving the states, but because automation will eliminate those kinds of jobs and lots of others.
We need a radically different approach that I haven't heard a single politician in the states talk seriously about.
Really? A hopeless life? Being forced into a miserable reservation? Stripped of human dignity?
They are not "forced" to live on the reservation. They are US citizens and can live anywhere in the country. Those that leave the reservation tend to do far better than those who stay. One of my co-workers in San Jose is a Crow Indian. She abstains from drinking alcohol, and she tries to avoid sugar and starch as much as possible. She has relatives living on the Crow Reservation in Montana, and they have the same problems as Pine Ridge with alcoholism and diabetes, despite the Sioux and Crow having a very different historical relationship with the American government: the Crow were allies of the US in the wars against the Sioux and Cheyenne.
Germany doesn't favour free enterprise as a randlicker would recognise it. They have commie things like laws against unfair dismissal and there's even worker representation on company boards. I'm not sure if you're allowed to work 60 hours a week with no extra pay even if you want to.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This is true, however the added problem is that the alternative is lying to these people.
This is the underlying issue with right-wing populism: it's easy to score points and votes by telling people that somehow high-paying manufacturing jos are going to come back and everything is going to be okay but it doesn't make it any more true. However low-skilled/uneducated workers who're most affected by this also often lack the education to understand why this is so, making them the easiest segment of the population to deceive into voting against their own interests.
This is difficult to oppose bevause doing so means talking about realities of the global economy and that makes you an easy target for 'globalist elite' -type of attacks. There's an ongoing attempt in narrative across the entire west according to which there's one side fighting for domestic jobs and the other side is taking them away. Both ends of the left-right --spectrum have their own varieties of this narrative:
The left is making the point that in the name of free trade the right cares about nothing else than maximizing profits and is thus helping companies take jobs away via trade-agreements and so on.
The right is making the argument that the jobs are going because of high-taxation and leftist policies and to remain comptetitive the tax burden has to be cut so companies will bring jobs back.
The thing to realize is both of these arguments are missing the point: the jobs are not going to come back for the simple reason that the standard of living in the west has risen so high that unskilled manufacturing labor is massively expensive (and hence, inefficient) in the west compared to outsourcing and automation. The people who think that there's some magical fix with which american or european workers will suddenly become cost-efficient compared to someone in China making less than 10 dollars a day, or an automated production line with an even lower cost, are deluded.
The problem is jobs and employment have been at the core of politics and political debates for so long neither side can fess up and say we need to start to consider the rather unavoidable fact that full-employment in the 21st century does not seem like a reachable goal and we need to start talking about options to deal with that. But this inevitably means income-distribution policies like basic income, which if mentioned in the american landscape will brand you a communist and an 'enemy of free enterprise". This despite the fact that the current development of increasing automation and decreasing need for labor is itself a direct result of free enterprises and the market doing what the market does: favoring efficiency and cutting production costs.
So there exists this negative feedback-loop in which both sides are continuing to talk about jobs and bringing back jobs because that's the mantra that they know will appeal to the voters most negatively affected by current ongoing trends but that doesn't mean the proposed solutions are actually going to work, and thus the politicians and the voters in tandem keep digging themselves into a deeper and deeper hole. Honest discussion is needed about the future modern automation means for us as a species. Currently the situation reminds me of a schizophrenic who at the same time wants cheap and powerful electronics and consumer goods and at the same time wants to be paid a lot for manufacturing said products. In other words our desires as consumers (cheap commodities and high pay) are in direct conflict with the current technological development that's pretty much unstoppable,
We've created the economy to answer to our material needs and desires as efficiently as possible, and now that that efficiency means taking ourselves off the production line and letting machines do most of the work we recoil, because production is valued so much t
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
The ACA made every poor, cheap and lazy person contribute something to the unlimited healthcare they got for free before. The Republicans plan takes away the mandatory buying of insurance and replaced it with either nothing or more free unlimited health care.
The ACA had flaws but it set a minimum standard of care, made everyone buy into it, to defray the cost.
the acha under Republicans increases costs by letting people choose not to have coverage, and decreases the ability to get care.
Two governor's are already taking the options that Republicans siad are posion pills that no sane person would take.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.