Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Friday, June 25, 2021

American Exceptionalism, yet again

The 4 1/2 readers of this humble blog are well aware that life expectancy in the U.S. is  lower than that of other wealthy countries, even though we spend twice as much on health care. It's right on top, every time you come here. The bad news is that the utterly inept response of the U.S. to the Covid-19 pandemic made the gap even worse. Here's an analysis by Steven Woolf in BMJ. Since people tend to complain when I link to stories about the U.S. in journals published in furrin lands, I point out that Woolf is a good old Merkin who works at Virginia Commonwealth University in the capital of the Confederate States of America. Here's a bit of the abstract (emphasis mine):


Between 2010 and 2018, the gap in life expectancy between the US and the peer country average increased from 1.88 years (78.66 v 80.54 years, respectively) to 3.05 years (78.74 v 81.78 years). Between 2018 and 2020, life expectancy in the US decreased by 1.87 years (to 76.87 years), 8.5 times the average decrease in peer countries (0.22 years), widening the gap to 4.69 years. Life expectancy in the US decreased disproportionately among racial and ethnic minority groups between 2018 and 2020, declining by 3.88, 3.25, and 1.36 years in Hispanic, non-Hispanic Black, and non-Hispanic White populations, respectively. In Hispanic and non-Hispanic Black populations, reductions in life expectancy were 18 and 15 times the average in peer countries, respectively. Progress since 2010 in reducing the gap in life expectancy in the US between Black and White people was erased in 2018-20; life expectancy in Black men reached its lowest level since 1998 (67.73 years), and the longstanding Hispanic life expectancy advantage almost disappeared.

 

And in case you want a picture:

 


 

What you want to look at in particular are those broken lines on the right, showing the decline in life expectancy after 2018. Although life expectancy in the U.S. was already declining before that, it fell off a cliff in that year. The decline affected everybody, though it was sharpest for Latinos, followed by Black people. A linked editorial discusses this further. This isn't only because more people died in the U.S. than in other countries, it's also because they tended to die at younger ages. This isn't because our health care isn't as good, it's because our health is worse. Prior to Covid-19, a lot of the decrease in life expectancy was attributable to drug overdoses, alcohol misuse, and suicide, and that is no doubt still the case. But we're doing something, or maybe a lot of things wrong, that Europe and Canada are doing right. It is what it is.

1 comment:

Don Quixote said...

People like to use the relatively young age of the United States of America as an excuse for its horrible behavior and racism. However, Canada is approximately the same age as a country. I’m sure there are many well-known reasons for the divergent paths these two countries have taken. In some ways, the two countries are not that different, but the differences are striking.