2023-04-18 02:22:56
LETTER FROM NEW YORK
The figure is known, American life expectancy has been in free fall for several years and stood at 76.1 years in 2021, the lowest level since 1996, according to data from the NCHS (National Center for Statistics on health) of 2022. The decline since 2019 is 2.7 years, unheard of since the beginning of the 1920s, and the Covid-19 does not explain everything.
Less known, however, are the reasons for this poor performance. The first is worthy of Monsieur de La Palisse: if Americans don’t live old, it’s because they die sooner. One in 25 Americans age 5 today will not live to age 40, an extensive survey by the Financial Times published on March 31: it is four or five times more than in other developed countries. The explanations are caricatures: homicides, traffic accidents, overdoses, illnesses linked to obesity, Americans are dying of the ills of America, in the prime of life.
The wealth of Americans and the abysmal sums spent on health (18.3% of gross domestic product, against about 12% in France and the United Kingdom) do nothing about it. All social categories combined, Americans live less long than the inhabitants of other developed countries.
5.6 times more homicides in proportion than in France
The detailed figures for the year 2021 published by the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are edifying. That year there were 26,000 homicides for a population of 332 million. This is in proportion 5.6 times more than in France (948 homicides for 67.8 million inhabitants). The country also experienced some 49,000 deaths from road and transport accidents. Certainly, we travel a lot by car in the United States, but it is 2.8 times more than in France. The suicide rate has increased by 70% in twenty years and is now proportionally comparable to that of France, with around 48,000 deaths (compared to around 9,000 in France).
Finally, opioid overdoses caused around 98,000 deaths across the Atlantic, 35 times more in proportion than in France (2020 figures). This abuse of medicinal or illicit substances hits young men hard: 85% of the 54,000 victims aged 25 to 54 are men.
These statistics are also correlated to geography, as shown by a map of the country dating from 2021 and published on Twitter by Nobel Prize in Economics (2008) Paul Krugman on April 2. The map of premature deaths covers the center and the south of the United States, going down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers: areas inhabited by white populations, then black in the south, hit by obesity, junk food, drugs, with red spots in the western and Alaskan deserts, where Native American reservations and settlements are located. Oglala Lakota County, South Dakota – where the Sioux massacre at Wounded Knee took place in 1890 by the 7e cavalry regiment – has the lowest life expectancy: 66.8 years. The highest, 86.8, is in a mountainous county in Colorado.
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