Reply #18: The UN ranks us 38th in life expectancy

[txlibdem]

No other western nation is lower, except Portugal which comes in at #39. Your post makes that sound kinda rosy. I happen to think that we should be a little bit closer to #1.

And I have seen stats that say ours IS going down, not for the rich bastards but for women, people of color and the poor. Overall statistics can mask a huge injustice, it seems.

Life expectancy for American women is declining for the first time since the Spanish influenza epidemic in 1918, according to study published today by the Harvard School of Public Health and reported in the Washington Post.
Life Expectancy Decline for US Women is Widespread
The drop in life expectancy for American women was noted in nearly 1,000 counties—home to roughly 12 percent of U.S. women—mostly in low-income and rural areas in the Deep South, Appalachia and parts of the Midwest, but the downward trend also was apparent in one county in Maine.

...

The study found declining longevity in a much smaller percentage of American men—only about 4 percent. And it’s not just women vs men, it is American women vs the world. Researchers involved in the study said that no similar trends could be found in other countries, so declining life expectancy among women seems to be a uniquely American experience—at least for now.

http://environment.about.com/od/healthenvironment/a/life_expectancy.htm

Many advocates of US health reform point to the nation’s relatively low life-expectancy rankings as evidence that the health care system is performing poorly. Others say that poor US health outcomes are largely due not to health care but to high rates of smoking, obesity, traffic fatalities, and homicides. We used cross-national data on the fifteen-year survival of men and women over three decades to examine the validity of these arguments. We found that the risk profiles of Americans generally improved relative to those for citizens of many other nations, but Americans’ relative fifteen-year survival has nevertheless been declining. For example, by 2005, fifteen-year survival rates for forty-five-year-old US white women were lower than in twelve comparison countries with populations of at least seven million and per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of at least 60 percent of US per capita GDP in 1975. The findings undercut critics who might argue that the US health care system is not in need of major changes.

http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/hlthaff.2010.0073v1