Median survival time for men Sanders' age who got a stent after a heart attack is 3.1 years

[Tom Rinaldo]

36. While technically true that statistic is somewhat misleading

It is hard to find the difference between mean, median, and mode estimates discussed in relation to life expectancy, but I found this:

"the mean, median and mode can be very different. For these survival distributions it is perhaps remarkable how far the mode is from the mean: for girls born now, even assuming there are no more increases in survival, their most likely age to die is 90, seven years more than the mean on 83. For little baby boys the mode is 86, again seven years more than the mean of 79. And even the median is 3 years more than the mean. That’s why I now believe that ‘life expectancy’ is misleading."
https://medianism.org/2017/06/12/median-vs-mean-life-expectancy/

Median makes no distinction between sub group variances. Half of everyone falls on one side, half of everyone falls on the other. So smokers get lumped in with non smokers, and desperately poor people are lumped in with people who can afford a healthy lifestyle and the best preventive health care money can buy, people who are suffering from multiple serious ailments get lumped in with those who are only contending with one or none, people who monitor their health regularly are lumped in with those who ignore all warning signs, and so on.

All of our elderly candidates running for President are positioned to do far better than a median data point would otherwise indicate.