Republican healthcare policies are pushing America closer to Third World life-expectancy levels
Health outcome statistics are notably hard to parse, given all the factors that go into the health profile of a population or country. But they often can be boiled down to one convenient metric for how well a country serves the health needs of its people: life expectancy.
By that measure, the United States stinks, and according to a new projection of global longevity, by comparison with other developed and even some less-developed countries, over the next decade or so it’s going to get drastically worse.
The projection, from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, was published last week in the Lancet, a leading British medical journal. It was based on data from the Global Burden of Disease research project overseen by the World Health Organization, which tries to identify the most important diseases affecting health worldwide and project their course into the future.
The projection underscores a shocking near-term statistic on life expectancy — the U.S. is on pace for its third annual decline in longevity. Such a three-year trend hasn’t occurred for 100 years, or since 1916-18, during a global flu pandemic.
America’s rankings in these data should cause nationwide shame. The nation’s 2016 average life expectancy from birth of 78.7 years placed the U.S. at 43rd among the 196 countries in the data set. That was easily the worst among highly industrialized countries, trailing Denmark (80.7 years) by 15 places. Japan, a long-term leader in life expectancy, came in first, at 83.7, followed by Switzerland and Singapore (both 83.3).
More shocking is the projection for 2040. That year, the researchers say, the U.S. will fall to 64th place, based on a projected average longevity of 79.8. Although life expectancy will increase by 1.1 years, that will be outpaced by greater improvements in other countries. The projected 2040 leader will be Spain, by virtue of it improving its life expectancy to 85.8 years from 82.9 in 2016. (Japan will fall to second place because its life expectancy will improve only to 85.7.)
http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-life-expectancy-20181025-story.html?fbclid=IwAR1X7cfdNIPEtZ8gSeKEG-Y8QzkjVOIj-WeewpOVD2i3TX7XP7_WvRBFhAc
= new reply since forum marked as read
