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The average American has the same life expectancy as the worst part of England

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Re: The average American has the same life expectancy as the worst part of England

#261

Post by steve_adams_86 »

pedrosorio wrote: post #175
sgc wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you can see in his chart at [1] from the same thread, drugs, violence, and accidents only explain less than 1/3 of the difference, so the rest would be mainly various disease/lifestyle and care related issues (the overwhelmingly top causes of death in the US [2]). I think those graphs are a easy to misread, the long tail of somewhat poorer results is less dramatic than that younger gap, but actually includes much…

> In [1], you can see that the last cause, cardiovascular, explains more of the difference than drugs, violence, and accidents combined. This is for overall life expectancy, not 5 to 40 death rates though. I would expect cardio-metabolic disease is a significant driver of "early" deaths (say before 65) in those over 40 in the US compared to other developed countries.

You’d expect correctly; there is non-trivial number of people dying from those diseases between 40 and 65 in the USA, and the number is only increasing.

In the USA and Canada, the probability of death from these diseases is roughly 1 in 3.

As I recall, other developed countries are kind of catching up. Malignant neoplasms and cardiovascular disease are becoming the typical causes of death in the majority of cases in most countries, generally followed by accidental injuries and suicide.

The good news is that if you don’t kill yourself, you exercise, and you eat well, you can likely avoid or significantly delay these events. Accidental injury though, that’s hard to control for.

Re: The average American has the same life expectancy as the worst part of England

#262

Post by noelherrick »

The solution to this is known by everyone, including those who will fain ignorance. Implement universal healthcare (including mental health), regulate guns (insurance, registration, training, buybacks, red flag laws) including banning weapons of war, build public transportation and transition away from car-mandatory living in all but the most rural areas, and push for democratically-controlled unions and worker co-ops. The second tier would be around children, namely we should reinstate the child tax credit, make university free, and provide childcare. We need to have a conversation around maternal mortality as well, because that is too darn high in the US (one theory is that we are too doctor-controlled and they will be more likely to induce or perform a c-section).

This may seem like a grabbag of policies, but it's because (as it is mentioned in the Twitter thread), there are a grabbag of failures: lack of healthcare, forced dependency on cars, and deaths of despair, which are very closely tied to our crushing work culture (especially for blue collar folks). The neoliberal capitalism alienates people from their labor and their fellow worker, and makes widely available drugs, alcohol, and ultra-processed foods to numb the pain after a long shift. We've created a machine that's very good at crushing people up to turn them into money for people who will never be able to spend what they have already (cf. the Sacklers and the opioid epidemic or Bezos and workers urinating in bottles).

America has so much potential. I still have great hope we can come together. Right now, it's like the Onion wrote: "'No Way to Prevent This', Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens". We have to stop pretending we don't know the solution. The jig is up. I feel like we're in the movie Fury. Everyone knows Germany is doomed, but more people have to die because of Hitler's ego and the cowardice of everyone around him. We've let the psychopaths run things for too long. We have to take our power back.

Re: The average American has the same life expectancy as the worst part of England

#263

Post by jjav »

magicalist wrote: post #215
throwaway173738 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only for marketplace plans. For plans purchased through employers the sky is the limit.

> For plans purchased through employers the sky is the limit Almost everyone with insurance has a maximum out of pocket limit now. It's possible to have a grandfathered employer health plan, but they'd have to have been running it since 2010 without substantial changes since then, including in benefits or cost increases. There are very few employer health insurance plans that would have met that criteria, and even fe…

> Almost everyone with insurance has a maximum out of pocket limit now.

"maximum out of pocket" does not mean what any normal person would interpret it to mean. More than one year I have had to pay way more than the "maximum out of pocket".

The insurance company gets to decide unilaterally how much of what you pay out of pocket is credited toward their tally of what you supposedly paid out of pocket. In several years I've paid a lot more out of pocket than what the insurance statement credits me for having paid.

Re: The average American has the same life expectancy as the worst part of England

#264

Post by Gordonjcp »

hooverd wrote: post #84
tasty_freeze wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution to a low quality HN comment is to downvote it, not to return the volley with another low quality comment.

Hey, those munchies boxes look delicious!

It can be hit or miss.

Some places just give you loads of chips and naan bread, which is a bit of a con.

One near where I used to live had four different types of chicken chaat alone, which is kind of the opposite end of the scale. I guess curry isn't really a thing in the US?

Re: The average American has the same life expectancy as the worst part of England

#265

Post by rendang »

meany wrote: post #150
auggierose wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drivers in the US just seem incredibly aggressive to me. I remember crossing some street in downtown Pittsburgh, and a car coming towards me. The guy was clearly seeing me, and accelerating instead of slowing down. I jumped forwards and survived.

Ive lived around the country and the driving culture varies significantly from region to region. East Coast cities are the worst, whereas I find Seattle, where I live now, very east going. Having moved from the east coast, it shocked me to see drivers just stop for pedestrians, even outside of marked off crosswalks. Try that in NY and you’re dead. I saw the same thing in Europe, southern Italy was very chaotic roads…

In Seattle all unmarked intersections are crosswalks & pedestrians waiting to cross have right of way.

Re: The average American has the same life expectancy as the worst part of England

#266

Post by LanceH »

Schroedingersat wrote: post #235
LanceH wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No victim blaming. Smaller cars are more dangerous given an accident is already occurring between multiple cars. Choosing a car to be in an accident, a bigger car is a solid choice. Of course, that skips over being in an accident at all . It also skips over any concern for others -- but so many people view that hypothetical accident as clearly the other person's fault, so may as well go with the big car.

> Smaller cars are more dangerous given an accident is already occurring between multiple cars. Again, you're victim blaming here. The small car is not causing the danger. T-shirts are not more dangerous than guns just because someone firing a gun randomly into a crowd is less likely to get hurt than someone in the crowd wearing a t-shirt.

Still not victim blaming, go back and read the whole thing again.

Which car is safer if you're choosing a car to be in? big or small? The bigger is safer and the smaller is more dangerous (to be in), in a multi-car accident.

My whole post was on the rationalization of the choice of size of car. Language matters, as you say. It is about people not choosing the smaller car and not being the victim due to driving a smaller car.

Yes, the escalation of size causes problems in aggregate, but not the point of what I wrote.

Re: The average American has the same life expectancy as the worst part of England

#268

Post by bobthepanda »

grecy wrote: post #156
Avshalom wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youth suicide has always been pretty bad in the US and it's getting worse https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/youth-suicide-rates-are-... That's from 2019, numbers for the last 3 years are a little harder get but like attempts went up but deaths went down at least in most places but in a couple places deaths shot up a lot? https://www.nichd.nih.gov/newsroom/news/042722-COVID-adolesc... https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us…

I was floored when I met some students from NYU who explained they've installed nets in the library because there have been so many suicides from people jumping. Yikes. Not exactly how I remember it.. but yeah. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nyu-bobst-library-suicides-al...

NYU is also more vertical than most universities in the US. How many university buildings in the US are 12 floors or higher?

Re: The average American has the same life expectancy as the worst part of England

#269

Post by rgmerk »

wkat4242 wrote: post #227
rgmerk wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweden’s murder rate is less than a fifth of the murder rate in the United States. It seems like their policies do go a big way to solve the problem, as infeasible as they appear to be for the USA.

You can't compare murder rates in the US with Sweden. They have a real welfare system, diminishing social inequalities and with that the feeding ground for crime.

Sounds like a great idea…

…but it’s also worth pointing out that murder rates are also a lot lower than the US in other developed countries that don’t have Scandinavian levels of welfare transfers.

Re: The average American has the same life expectancy as the worst part of England

#270

Post by jamiegreen »

bilbo0s wrote: post #119
whakim wrote: post #97

The original article points out that the primary difference between the US and the UK (as well as other peer countries) is that you're much more likely to die young in the US. A 5-year-old in the United States has a 4% chance of dying before age 40, whereas a 5-year-old in Australia, Austria, Canada, England and Wales, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, or Switzerland has ~1% chance of dying before age 40 (val…

Woah! Deaths by billion vehicle miles in UK - 5.2. In US - 12.5. (both have tens of thousands of KSI, but the US has over twice as many per cap. In fact, way, more KSI from car accidents than even gun related homicide in the US. I hadn't realized that!) Deaths by gun related homicide in UK - 200. In US - 20000. (Both numbers pale in comparison to motor vehicle deaths, but there are a lot more in the US. Probably to b…

The road deaths surprise me the most , as most American roads are big and straight and most British roads are small and squiggly!
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