USA - A Rich Death Trap

The National Center for Health Statistics alerted Americans to two facts about life and death in the U.S.

The first fact was sadly unsurprising: The coronavirus pandemic killed so many people that U.S. life expectancy fell from roughly 79 in 2019 to 76 in 2021—the largest two-year decline in nearly a century. The drop was sharpest among Native Americans and Alaska Natives, whose life expectancy fell to 65, close to the national average during World War II.

Life expectancy is perhaps the most important statistic on the planet, synthesizing a country’s scientific advances, policy errors, and social sins into a single number.

The second fact was perhaps more alarming: The U.S. fared worse in life expectancy than other high-income countries. While most of the developed world saw conditions improve in the second year of the pandemic, more Americans died of COVID after the introduction of the vaccines than before their invention.

The American mortality mystery clearly goes much deeper than the pandemic, however. The U.S. suffers from a raft of local epidemics that have turned America into the death trap of the wealthy world.

Some of the most immediate causes of America’s high death rate are guns, drugs, and cars. The U.S. has more guns and gun violence than any other rich country. We have more drug-overdose deaths than any other high-income country—both overall and on a per capita basis. Even before the pandemic, life expectancy in the U.S. declined for consecutive years in 2015 and 2016, largely because of the opioid epidemic and drug overdoses. 

This has all been quite gloomy, so let me end with two somewhat optimistic observations. The U.S. has world-class health care in some categories, such as cancer treatments. American men have the lowest rate of deaths from prostate cancer among rich countries, due in part to aggressive screening. And breast-cancer mortality rates are falling faster in the U.S. than in similar nations. These facts suggest that the U.S. is not utterly incompetent but rather selectively competent, and that if we refocus our health-care policies on certain tangible outcomes, we can improve quickly.

Another stunning fact is that immigrants to the U.S. live as long, or longer, than just about any group of people in the world. In fact, foreign-born Americans live so much longer than native-born Americans—seven years longer for men, and 6.2 years longer for women—that immigration alone accounted for roughly half of America’s total life-expectancy gains from 2007 to 2017.

-www.theatlantic.com, 7 September 2022