Not Staying Alive

I recently went into the deep history of human life expectancy. Now let ' s look at recent history in the U.S. vs. the rest of the wealthy countries.The OECD is the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. It actually includes some countries you probably don ' t think of as wealthy, such as Mexico and Latvia, but also western Europe, Australia and Japan. As you can see, in the mid-90s the U.S. was average among OECD countries. As life expectancy increased throughout the OECD in the early part of this century,the U.S. lagged behind, and then life expectancy in the U.S. stopped increasing entirely.I snatched this graphic from an editorial in BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal) by Stephen Woolf and Laudan Aron, both Americans.  (No link due to paywall.) They note that this can  in part be explained by the opioid epidemic, suicides and alcohol abuse, which they call " deaths of despair. " As have many observers, they link this to economic dislocation, particularly in smaller cities and rural areas, that has affected the fortunes of lower educated white workers. I think this is a bit facile.I don ' t think that is a big part of the explanation for the opioid epidemic, which has been pretty indiscriminate in its victims. However, we are clearly doing something wrong. We are not investing sufficiently in our people, to put it broadly. If families are struggling, they don ' t need to be lectured to about takers vs. makers and have their food stamps and Medi...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs