Posted on 04/26/2008 10:49:51 AM PDT by The_Republican
Americans were shocked on Tuesday to read the results of a study by four scientists affiliated to the Initiative for Global Health at Harvard University.* Since 1983 life expectancy has declined for women in hundreds of US counties, most of them in the south, and for men in a dozen counties.
Two troubling explanations arise. The first is that, for reasons that are not yet clear, health is deteriorating in the US. Such things happen. In alcohol-soaked post-communist Russia men die at about the age of 59. In Aids-ravaged Namibia the lifespan has dropped 10 years since independence in 1990. One of the doctors who wrote the paper, Christopher Murray, is pessimistic. “I think this is a harbinger,” he told The Washington Post. “This is not going to be isolated to this set of counties, is my guess.”
But since US life expectancy continues its modest rise (from 77.8 years in 2003 to 77.9 in 2004), even under heavy immigration, it is premature to be worried about US health in the aggregate. Alarming news about mortality is not unprecedented. Life expectancy fell among poor US men in the early 1960s, for unknown reasons, and in the late 1980s, probably because of Aids and crack cocaine. Where US healthcare and hygiene work, they are incomparably the best in the world. A 2006 study in which several of the Harvard authors participated found that the 10m healthiest Americans have “one of the highest levels of life expectancy on record – three years better than Japan for females and four years better than Iceland for males”. Asian females in Bergen County, New Jersey, can expect to live an astounding 91 years. But the mortality rates of poor Appalachian whites resemble those of Panama or Mexico.
It is these disparities that are the real explanation and the real worry. The authors call them mortality inequality. The term is new but the obsession is not. It is similar to what Democratic politicians are talking about when they refer to America’s uninsured. The Congressional Budget Office issued its own report on disparities in life expectancy last week, and the Department of Health and Human Services has an initiative for eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in health. In the US whites have traditionally outlived blacks. That disparity has narrowed by almost two years since 1993, according to the US National Center for Health Statistics. But new disparities have arisen, most of them involving income. In 1980 the US rich lived 2.8 years longer than the poor (75.8 versus 73); today they live 4.5 years longer (79.2 versus 74.7).
Something similar has happened in Glasgow, which, in spite of recent economic success, is the symbol of a British mortality inequality problem that equals or exceeds that of the US. A “State of the City” report published this year found that men in Glasgow’s pleasant East Dunbartonshire suburbs lived on average to be 81; in Calton, where 60 per cent of residents were “economically inactive”, the life expectancy for men was 54, a figure more typical of the southern hemisphere.
We have reached the end of two society-wide waves of mortality reduction, the first involving the conquest of contagious diseases in the early 20th century, the second the steep reduction in heart-attack deaths in the past four decades. This levelling-off in gains is a net result of longevity winners and longevity losers. The extreme mobility of Americans, which has wrought cyclonic transformations, for better or for worse, on neighbourhoods, towns and counties, makes the identities of those winners and losers more geographically obvious. A recent book by the journalist Bill Bishop, The Big Sort,** shows how like-minded Americans have congregated according to similarities in education, political ideology, wealth and various other attributes. It is probable that healthy people are sorting themselves into enclaves too.
The authors too hastily discount the possibility that migration accounts for widening mortality disparities at the county level. New York city shows why. Life expectancy there has risen 6.2 years since 1990. It would be absurd to believe that this dramatic shift is the result of public health measures or private resolves to quit smoking and eat right. New Yorkers live longer not because they are doing different things than in 1990 but because they are a different set of people. Certain people have moved in – disproportionately young, employed elites with health insurance, good diet habits and health club memberships. Others have moved out. If those people have been priced out – and there is every reason to believe they have been – then they are disproportionately more likely to be smokers, more likely to be under- or uninsured, and less likely to know what trans-fats are. Now they are in some other part of the country, driving the life expectancy down.
What kind of inequality is “mortality inequality”? This is a question for the political system, not the medical profession. Politicians will imply that it is like income inequality, liable to obvious if controversial remedies. But more probably it just the occasion to have a counterproductive, liberty-threatening ruckus over something that the political system can do nothing about. Life is a funny commodity. It is not a private resource that, like income, can be pooled and then more fairly distributed by an equitable government. Laisser-faire is not a recipe for creating more of it. It is a commodity for which the demand always approaches infinity and the supply always equals one.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
one of the most powerful men in the world?...probably extremely rich?.....can "sucker" any woman apparently into sex and a Lewinsky?
for him, its paid off.... never doing an honest days worth or paying taxes like the little man nor behaving morally or ethically or statesmanlike.
sometimes our great God above makes us scatch our heads......I would go insane over people like the Clintons except I know in the end, justice will be served...
“authors too hastily discount the possibility that migration accounts for widening mortality disparities at the county level”
THe reporter gets it in one!
Watch out for a new wave of Nanny State stats - the real lies.
New buzzword, “economic inequality” will take off and soar. More fuel for the leftist redistribution of wealth reasons.
oops, that should be “mortality inequality” in which they equate lower income with lower life span.
Only Leftist would ever think that they redistribute Life.
The only way that the redistribution of life span could ever be achieved in any realistic way is to limit the life span of all people the way it was done in the movie Blade Runner
In the movie all people were killed upon reaching age 35.
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