The Center for Disease Control recently announced that average U.S.life expectancy has fallen to 76.4 years, the lowest in two decades. Obviously the Covid pandemic has much to do with this recent decline. But is the United States doing a much worse job than comparable nations in health care, as measured by life expectancy?
Yes. In 1980 life expectancy in the United States roughly matched that of other “peer” countries, members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the club of relatively wealthy nations. But since Covid hit, OECD nations have dropped an average of only .2 percent in life expectancy, while the U.S. has dropped by 2.7 percent.
In perspective – this is nothing new. Other nations, not all of them advanced industrial states, have long outperformed us in keeping their citizens alive longer. In the most recent rankings by the United Nations Population Division, the United States ranks 46th among the nations of the world in life expectancy, slightly behind Cuba and slightly ahead of Albania. This follows a long-term trend of falling ever lower in the rankings over recent decades.
Those ahead of us in life expectancy are Asian nations such as Japan, Singapore, and South Korea, and most of the nations of Europe. Life expectancy in Hong Kong is six years longer than in the United States.
Why should this be? We clearly lead the world in medical research and state-of-the-art medical technology, facilities, and treatment. And we spend more on medical care than other nations, over twice as much on a per capita basis as other OECD countries.
We did perform much more poorly on Covid than comparable nations, but the gap predates Covid and goes much deeper. Is it a result of the epidemic of drug overdoses (100,000 deaths a year)? Or maybe our extraordinary tolerance of gun violence? Both of these are critical issues that need to be addressed, but in themselves do not account for the numbers.
When other explanations are exhausted, we come back to one basic stark fact about nations with longer life expectancy. They have universal health care.
True the life expectancy of people in the U.S. has fallen recently. But the real disgrace is that it is still 15 years higher than the life expectancy of the people of the "Democratic" Republic of the Congo. The DRC is the place where cobalt for our cell phone batteries comes from. (Hint: There is a connection!)