Life Expectancy In US Is Falling Amid Surges In Chronic Illness [View all]

An Epidemic of Chronic Illness Is Killing Us Too Soon, Washington Post, Oct. 3, 2023. Ed. - The US is failing at a fundamental mission — keeping people alive. 🪦

- Chronic conditions thrive in a sink-or-swim culture, with the US government spending far less than peer countries on preventive medicine and social welfare generally. ⚖

After decades of progress, life expectancy — long regarded as a singular benchmark of a nation’s success — peaked in 2014 at 78.9 years, then drifted downward even before the coronavirus pandemic. Among wealthy nations, the US in recent decades went from the middle of the pack to being an outlier. And it continues to fall further and further behind.

A year-long Washington Post examination reveals that this erosion in life spans is deeper and broader than widely recognized, afflicting a far-reaching swath of the US.

While opioids and gun violence have rightly seized the public’s attention, stealing hundreds of thousands of lives, chronic diseases are the greatest threat, killing far more people between 35 and 64 every year, The Post’s analysis of mortality data found. Heart disease and cancer remained, even at the height of the pandemic, the leading causes of death for people 35 to 64. And many other conditions — private tragedies that unfold in tens of millions of U.S. households — have become more common, including diabetes and liver disease.

These chronic ailments are the primary reason American life expectancy has been poor compared with other nations.

Sickness and death are scarring entire communities in much of the country. The geographical footprint of early death is vast: In a quarter of the nation’s counties, mostly in the South and Midwest, working-age people are dying at a higher rate than 40 years ago, The Post found. The trail of death is so prevalent that a person could go from Virginia to Louisiana, and then up to Kansas, by traveling entirely within counties where death rates are higher than they were when Jimmy Carter was president.

This phenomenon is exacerbated by the country’s economic, political and racial divides. America is increasingly a country of haves and have-nots, measured not just by bank accounts and property values but also by vital signs and grave markers. Dying prematurely, The Post found, has become the most telling measure of the nation’s growing inequality. The mortality crisis did not flare overnight. It has developed over decades, with early deaths an extreme manifestation of an underlying deterioration of health and a failure of the health system to respond...

- Read More + US Map, Graphs, https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/interactive/2023/american-life-expectancy-dropping/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2023/10/02/takeaways-us-life-expectancy-crisis/