The life expectancy gap between those with a college degree and those without has widened. As you can see in this graph: another version of same graph here: full.png (1220×1022) (dwcdn.net) As you can see, from 1993 to 2010, life expectancy for both groups was increasing, but the gap between the two groups was slowly growing. Then beginning in 2010 life expectancy for those without a college degree stopped increasing and even began to very slowly decrease, while the life expectancy with a college degree continued to increase. Then beginning in 2019, there was a significant sudden drop in life expectancy for both groups. (with the coronavirus pandemic, people staying at their home, social isolation, and economic shutdown) But the drop in life expectancy for those without a college degree was three times greater than for those with a college degree. As of 2022, those without a college degree had a lower life expectancy than this group had in 1993, nearly 2 years less. Meanwhile, those with a college degree just went back down to the level that group had in 2011. Accounting for the widening mortality gap between American adults with and without a BA | Brookings Pdf: Brookings - Accounting for the Widening Mortality Gap between American Adults with and without a BA, Anne Case and Angus Deaton It looks like Americans without a college degree are hurting more. Part of it could be economic. The economic shutdown hurt lower income Americans more. For example, many restaurants were closed. Part of it could be an increase in drug overdoses and suicides in response to economic circumstances.
Besides from Cuba, what other country in the world has as much diversity and spread in distribution of incomes as the US and has UHC? (That's sort of a snide rhetorical question, since I've already discussed this with you before. I don't wish to go too far off topic in this thread)
Well, we have a better “minimum wage” than you but what we, and Canada have is a population thinly dispersed over a vast area. Take West Australia - the only “Tertiary Hospitals” are in Perth That is in the South West corner of the state - everything else really bad is flown to Perth on a wing and a prayer. To give you perspective WA is about the size of one third of the mainland USA
Curiously enough there is a SHORTAGE of rural hospitals in the US that began in 2010. https://www.chiefhealthcareexecutiv...struggle-to-find-workers-and-not-just-doctors Without those local hospitals means traveling long distances and for many the cost of doing so is prohibitive in terms to transportation, accomodations and lost income. These factors weigh the scales against those without college educations. Healthcare in America would be entirely UNAFFORDABLE if it wasn't for Obamacare. The average X-ray costs $350 and a visit to the doctor averages $450 while drug prices are INSANE.
What is there like 24 million people in Australia and the landmass about the same as the 48 states of America. I think the difference between my country your country is your country is empty. My state has more people into your country.
Bowerbird, I know you are proposing a government solution to deal with the problem (spend more money, exert more government control), but can we talk about the reasons for the problem in the first place? I mean, if we look at the graph, WHY was this not as much an issue in 1993, or 2010 ? Why did things become worse later? What was the cause of this change? You seem to want to focus on the issue of healthcare, but I'd like to discuss the underlying economics.
Bowerbird, it's true that Australia has a lower total population density than the U.S., and in most areas of Australia there are few people, but paradoxically it is also true that more of the total population of Australia is concentrated into just a handful of surrounding bigger city areas than the U.S. We've already had this discussion in other threads. About 65% of Australia's total population resides within 70km of just four major cities. Meaning the country's population is, overall, more concentrated than it is in the U.S. This link estimates that 86.36% of Australia's total population is urbanized. 5.4% of the Australian population is Black or Aboriginal, compared to 16.8% in the U.S. Australia's population is 25 percentage points more White than the U.S. (That's not 25% more, it would be more like the percentage is 43% higher)
That is true but remote rural areas have longevity rates up to 7 years less than metro dwellers and our indigenous population is worse https://www.indigenoushpf.gov.au/re...-–-health-status-and-outcomes/life-expectancy The real issue is still access to affordable healthcare https://www.statista.com/chart/8286/us-will-trail-other-rich-nations-in-life-expectancy-by-2030/ There is also this pre COVID it begs the question if home deaths are rising in the USA - is that because people cannot afford hospitals?
Are you going to talk about why the problem in America has grown worse? I don't think we're comparing America to other countries. We are comparing America to America 30 years ago.
America's Working Class Is Struggling to Survive the Gauntlet of Middle Age, opinion written by Ryan Zickgraf, Jacobin (News), October 9, 2023 article: New research finds that Americans without college degrees live roughly eight and a half years less than their college-educated counterparts. Being working-class in America means being ground down and left behind, explaining the rise of “deaths of despair.” For Americans without college degrees, life expectancy starting at age twenty-five was 49.8 years (almost seventy-five years old) on the eve of the pandemic, down from 51.6 years in 1992 (or seventy-seven). For Americans without college degrees, life expectancy starting at age twenty-five was 49.8 years (almost seventy-five years old) on the eve of the pandemic, down from 51.6 years in 1992 (or seventy-seven). My brother is only forty-four years old, but most of his best friends are dead. Three of them made a suicide pact, and all ended their lives over the course of a sorrowful summer in the aughts. Another succumbed to a drug-fueled swimming pool accident. Most recently, his old pal Zach passed away from liver failure at thirty-nine — the result of drinking roughly a bottle of booze a day for years. I worried that my brother would join the deceased during the COVID lockdown after he shot himself in a moment of rage and hopelessness. But he’s relatively back to normal since then. The same can’t be said for a vast swath of struggling working-class Americans without college degrees. According to new research from Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the authors of the 2020 book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, life expectancy for those without college degrees peaked around 2010 and has been sinking ever since. For Americans without college degrees, life expectancy starting at age twenty-five — what’s termed “adult life expectancy” — was 49.8 years (almost seventy-five years old) on the eve of the pandemic, down from 51.6 years in 1992 (or seventy-seven). That’s a stark contrast with their college-educated counterparts, whose adult lifespan rose a half decade from fifty-four to fifty-nine years. Add it up: those who didn’t attend college live roughly eight and a half years less than those with at least bachelor’s degrees. Case and Deaton pin some of this disparity on the rise of so-called deaths of despair — adults dying of suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholic liver disease. They compare America’s decline in life expectancy to that among Soviet bloc countries after the collapse of the USSR in the ’90s. “Like those countries, the United States is failing its less-educated people, an awful condemnation of where the country is today,” they wrote in a New York Times editorial this week. This data is sad but not surprising. The story should be familiar by now. College education here is a proxy for class, and class matters. American wealth was equally split between the college-educated and non-college-educated in 1990, but today, three-quarters of wealth is owned by college graduates. For most of the last three decades, Americans cast ballots for two sides of the same neoliberal coin, endorsing a system in which resources are distributed according to ability rather than need. The neoliberal system handsomely rewarded the new meritocratic elite — the top 20 to 30 percent of the population that adapted and shined under our transformed information economy. The outlook hasn’t been so rosy for America’s ever-expanding underclass. If you’ve never attended college, live in a poverty-stricken neighborhood or community, are stuck in the service industries, and don’t have many “marketable skills” — well, sorry, you’ve been screwed by both major parties in terms of wages and benefits. Certainly, there have been some hopeful signs recently from the advent of “Bidenomics,” wage increases for some lower-wage workers, and an emerging labor movement pushing for more. But it hasn’t trickled down to people like my brother, who is one of the forty million or so Americans who lack a high-school diploma, much less a college degree. His prospects for a decent-paying job have been greatly limited. In middle age, he’s making $11 per hour as a full-time maintenance man at a high school. No matter who has sat in the Oval Office since my brother entered the workforce — Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden — his life has remained remarkably similar: living paycheck to paycheck on a paltry salary that’s hovered slightly above the poverty line. I fear for my brother and my four nephews, all young men without high school diplomas who face an uncertain future. Only a major paradigm shift away from neoliberalism can transform their prospects. Jacobin is kind of a more radical Left publication. The name itself hearkens back to group of intellectual-activists who had a role in the French Revolution, and eventually coalesced into the leading political party, synonymous with radicalism and Liberal Progressivism.
