Life expectancy in the US is going in the wrong direction. It peaked at 78.9 years back in 2014 and has been declining ever since, with the most recent figure at 76.4 years. You can't blame the pandemic, because the trend was in place well before that, explains the Washington Post in an in-depth look at the issue. What's more, the US keeps falling further behind other wealthy nations. Oft-cited issues such as gun violence and the opioid epidemic aren't helping, but they're not the primary factors in the decline, according to the analysis. Instead, the big culprit is chronic illness. Think heart disease, cancer, diabetes, liver disease, and the like, particularly in lower-income regions. "The big-ticket items are cardiovascular diseases and cancers," says Arline T. Geronimus of the University of Michigan. "But people always instead go to homicide, opioid addiction, HIV."
One of the most striking observations in the piece is this: "The best barometer of rising inequality in America is no longer income. It is life itself." The following stat illustrates it: In the 1980s, people in the poorest US communities were 9% more likely to die than those elsewhere in the nation; the figure grew to 49% in the last decade (and spiked above 60% during the pandemic). As the story puts it, advances in medicine and nutrition have been "overwhelmed by poverty, racism, distrust of the medical system, fracturing of social networks, and unhealthy diets built around highly processed food." And once again, the US fares worse than other nations on this: Its richest residents have a much lower life expectancy than those in, say, Canada, France, and Japan. Read the full story. (Or check out other Longforms.)
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