Cartoon – Commentary on Life Expectancy and Retirement
Tag Archives: Life Expectancy
Life expectancy in the US has decreased. That’s troubling
http://www.healthcaredive.com/news/life-expectancy-in-the-us-has-decreased-thats-troubling/431984/
Dive Insight:
Recent data show that a human’s lifespan is “fixed and subject to natural constraints” and that the limit of the “world’s oldest person” has not increased since the 1990s, when French woman Jeanne Calment died at age 122.
Still, the CDC’s findings paint a poor picture of the health of the U.S. population, as it shows an increase in “virtually every cause of death,” David Weir from the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan was quoted in The Washington Post. In fact, the rate of deaths related to eight of the 10 leading causes of death increased from 2014 to 2015. Only one decreased. The rate for heart disease increased 0.9% while the rate for cancer decreased by 1.7% from 2014 to 2015.
For American males, life expectancy changed from 76.5 years in 2014 to 76.3 years in 2015 and American females saw a decrease from 81.3 years in 2014 to 81.2 years in 2015. Earlier this year, CDC released data that showed more Americans died in 2014 from heart disease than any other cause with 74% of American deaths attributed to the same 10 common causes of death.
Worldwide, a recent study found in 2010, nearly a third of adults had hypertension.
“We’re seeing the ramifications of the increase in obesity,” said Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was quoted in The Washington Post.
The Next Trillion Dollar Industry Is Inside You
http://bigthink.com/videos/alec-ross-on-genomics-as-the-next-trillion-dollar-industry
Modern medicine is pretty fantastic, right? Wrong. Wow, you walked right into that honey trap. Pharmaceuticals are incredibly impressive and most of us wouldn’t be alive without them, but this industry is set to skyrocket in innovation over the next few decades, making our current practices seem as primitive as the 130-pound mobile phone that seemed really futuristic in ’90s.
CBO: Aging population, drugs driving federal healthcare spending
The country’s aging population, which is using more Social Security and requiring more Medicare coverage, is driving most of the spending increases, according to the report. Compared to 50 years ago, the number of people who are 65 years old and older has more than doubled, CBO found. As a result, Medicare outlays will remain at about 3% of GDP until 2018 but then increase on an annual basis through 2026.
“Over the next decade, as members of the baby-boom generation age and as life expectancy continues to increase, that number is expected to rise by more than one-third, boosting the number of beneficiaries of those programs,” the report states, adding, “As a result, projected spending for people age 65 or older in three large programs — Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — increases from roughly one-third of all federal noninterest spending in 2016 to about 40% in 2026.”
What Doctors Know About How Bad It Is, and Won’t Say
U.S. Health Care from a Global Perspective
Cross-national comparisons allow us to track the performance of the U.S. health care system, highlight areas of strength and weakness, and identify factors that may impede or accelerate improvement. This analysis is the latest in a series of Commonwealth Fund cross-national comparisons that use health data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), as well as from other sources, to assess U.S. health care system spending, supply, utilization, and prices relative to other countries, as well as a limited set of health outcomes.1,2 Thirteen high-income countries are included: Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. On measures where data are widely available, the value for the median OECD country is also shown. Almost all data are for years prior to the major insurance provisions of the Affordable Care Act; most are for 2013.
Health care spending in the U.S. far exceeds that of other high-income countries, though spending growth has slowed in the U.S. and in most other countries in recent years.3 Even though the U.S. is the only country without a publicly financed universal health system, it still spends more public dollars on health care than all but two of the other countries. Americans have relatively few hospital admissions and physician visits, but are greater users of expensive technologies like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines. Available cross-national pricing data suggest that prices for health care are notably higher in the U.S., potentially explaining a large part of the higher health spending. In contrast, the U.S. devotes a relatively small share of its economy to social services, such as housing assistance, employment programs, disability benefits, and food security.4 Finally, despite its heavy investment in health care, the U.S. sees poorer results on several key health outcome measures such as life expectancy and the prevalence of chronic conditions. Mortality rates from cancer are low and have fallen more quickly in the U.S. than in other countries, but the reverse is true for mortality from ischemic heart disease.
Life expectancy in the US is significantly lowered by three causes of injury
The three injury-causes of death accounted for almost half of the difference in men (1.02 years), and almost 20% of the difference in women (0.42 years). Gun deaths alone accounted for 21% of the gap in men and 4% in women. Car accidents accounted for 13% of the gap in men and 6% in women. Drug poisonings made up 14% of the gap in men and 9% of the gap in women.
The U.S. Health Disadvantage And The Role Of Spending
http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2016/06/01/the-u-s-health-disadvantage-and-the-role-of-spending/
Each week it seems, more evidence emerges regarding the poor health of Americans. We first documented a “U.S. health disadvantage” as chair and study director of the panel on understanding cross-national health differences among high-income countries at the National Academies in 2013.
Our panel’s report Shorter Lives, Poorer Health showed that, as long ago as 1980, the United States began to take a different path in terms of the health and survival of its population. We found evidence that the U.S health disadvantage compared to other countries existed among Americans at every age below 75, among all races/ethnicities, and among both men and women—but especially among women. We even found evidence of a health disadvantage among white, college-educated, non-obese, non-smoking, and health-insured Americans.
HENRY KOTULA 