The life expectancy of Americans has fallen for the third year in a row, and the decrease is being driven by the growing numbers of deaths of working-age people — those between the ages of 25 and 64, according to a deeply troubling study published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
From 1959 through 2016, life expectancy in the United States climbed by almost 10 years, from 69.9 years in 1959 to 78.9 years in 2014, the study reports. Most of that increase occurred, however, during one decade: 1969 to 1979.
After 1980, U.S. life expectancy rose more slowly, eventually plateauing after 2010 and then falling for three straight years, starting in 2015.
The life expectancy of babies born in the U.S. in 2017 was 78.6 years.
“This is an emergent crisis,” said Dr. Steven Woolf, the study’s lead author and director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, in an interview with Reuters reporter Linda Carroll. “And it is a uniquely American problem since it is not seen in other countries. Something about life in America is responsible.”
Since the 1980s, life expectancy in United States has been losing pace with other developed countries, and is now decreasing — even though U.S. spending on health care “vastly” exceeds that of other wealthy nations, the new study points out.
“According to one estimate, if the slow rate of increase in US life expectancy persists, it will take the United States more than a century to reach the average life expectancy that other high-income countries had achieved by 2016,” Woolf and his co-authors write.
As Woolf explained in his Reuters interview, those other high-income countries are not experiencing higher death rates among their working-aged adults. That’s likely because “in other countries there are more support systems for people who fall on hard times,” he said. “In America, families are left to their own devices to try to get by.”
[image_caption]Estimated Excess Deaths From Increasing Midlife Mortality, United States, 2010-2017[/image_caption]A variety of causes
Like other recent research has noted, this new study found that a greater proportion of Americans, particularly those at midlife, are dying from “deaths of despair” — drug-overdoses, suicides and alcoholism-related diseases — than in the past. But the current study also reports that Americans are dying at earlier ages from a variety of other causes, including heart disease, stroke, diabetes, pregnancy, certain cancers, infectious diseases and Alzheimer’s disease.
As an editorial that accompanies the study points out, obesity, which now affects almost 40 percent of American adults, is a factor in many of these early deaths, particularly ones caused by heart disease, stroke, diabetes and cancer.
“The negative effects of obesity on life expectancy were first predicted nearly 15 years ago,” the editorial notes.
But poverty, income inequality and other economic stressors are also factors. The study found that the highest increases in mortality rates are in the industrial Midwest (particularly Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Indiana) and other regions of the country that have been hard-hit since the 1980s by the loss of manufacturing jobs and other negative changes in the economy.
That pattern can also be observed within states. For example, in Minnesota and four other states (California, Kansas, Missouri and Virginia), increases in deaths among working-aged adults from “stress-related” conditions (drug overdoses, suicide, alcohol poisoning and alcohol-related liver disease) were highest in counties with a long history of high levels of poverty, unemployment and stagnant household income, the study reports.
“You have people and communities that have gone through a long period of economic stress,” Woolf told HealthDay reporter Dennis Thompson. “If you’re a family that’s been struggling for many years with these kind of stresses, that might lead to a set of consequences that could affect your health in multiple ways.”
But that stress doesn’t only lead people to turn to drugs, alcohol or suicide, he added. Americans who are struggling economically tend to live in conditions — known as “social determinants of health” — that can undermine their health. They may have limited access to healthful foods or may live in unsafe neighborhoods, for example. They may also not have enough money to afford health care or medications to treat chronic diseases, such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes.
“It might turn out that investment in the middle class, and helping to bring jobs and economic development to those communities, might do more to save lives than adding another wing onto the hospital,” Woolf said.
FMI: You’ll find the study on JAMA’s website. The data used in the study comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s WONDER database and the U.S. Mortality Database. Life expectancy data for 2018 is not yet available, but should be sometime early next year.
” ‘It might turn out that investment in the middle class, and helping to bring jobs and economic development to those communities, might do more to save lives than adding another wing onto the hospital,’ Woolf said.”
But . . . . but . . . but . . . . some rich billionaire can’t have his or her name plastered in big brass letters on an “investment in the middle class”! Can’t have the poor billionaires deprived of THAT ego-stroking perk, now, can we?
We spend more on healthcare, but still leave tens of millions of people without the ability to pay for it. How much of that healthcare spending was on the opioids that are killing so many people.
Aside from exterminating pollinator species, polluting the land and waters, and contributing to soil loss and loss of biodiversity, industrial agriculture and “economies of scale” have destroyed many a small community, and the food produced has made us ill over time, contributing to all manner of pathologies.
GWBush declared an “ownership” society, excusing rampant greed in the banks, such that a housing bubble was inflated to epic degrees. When it popped, Obama made the bankers whole, while regular Americans who got suckered into the scam were cast to the economic wolves. The obvious results are reflected in this study.
Now someone from either major political party please explain to me, which party is doing anything at all to put a check on corporate, bank or billionaire power, or questioning in any meaningful way, industrial agriculture?
Alas, we know the answer to that rhetorical question. One comes closer than the other by a wide margin, but “close” only counts, as they say, in horseshoes and hand grenades…
One of the great failures of capitalism – unacknowledged by its disciples – is its failure to distribute the benefits of the system equitably. Health care in this country follows a corporate model and structure, for the most part, and “equity” is very rarely a significant part of corporate structure. There’s money to be made (at least in the U.S.) in poor health and health care – lots of it – and there’s money to be made (also lots of it) by entities whose primary social effect, if not their purpose, is to induce poor health.
Win-win, except for the patient.
Another big factor contribute to this plummeting life expectancy in the USA, is this crazy level of overwork, work hours and lack of work-life balance. In my moderately large company, the top managers and execs in general have great health habits, don’t smoke, eat well,no opiates or other drugs, exercise, work hard and earn a lot of money. Yet we’ve still had a half-dozen employees die in the past year alone! Two died from sudden heart attacks enough one in the 40’s and one in his 30’s. We had an exec die when her car went off the road into a pond. One committed suicide when she didn’t see her family for a month. Two others died of accidents from extreme fatigue.
The common factor? All 6 of our execs and managers who died were working 60-80 hour weeks, one even more, week after week, with little vacation or rest time. They were constantly taking paperwork and forms home with them. They were getting a lot done, but they were exhausted and getting sick all the time, and even at their high levels, afraid of losing their jobs due to all the cheap labor the company likes to import from India on the H1B visa. So instead, the company lost them and their expertise by literally working them to death. What’s worse, like half of what they were doing at the office was useless busy work and admin, and useless meetings. This seems to be the “late stage capitalism” path the US is on, work even its most skilled workers to death and keep piling things on.
My cousin moved to Europe, she and her husband now work in France, they put in 35 hours a week and then go home. But they get as much or more done there than they do in the US, because the French workplaces don’t pile so much useless busy work on them and they do what they have expertise in. They’re even creating artistic works now and starting their own business, so they probably make even more money than they did in the United States, about the same taxes but they’re healthier and happier. The US style of capitalism and overwork is literally killing its citizens, and all the new-fangled new medicines and technology won’t stop the US plummeting life expectancy while this work culture keeps going on.