New report on lower life expectancy shows how much systems are failing in U.S.
In recent days the National Center for Health Statistics released a disturbing report on the precipitous decline in life expectancy for Americans over the past twenty-four months. Since COVID struck in 2020, the average life expectancy in the US has plummeted from 79 to 76, the sharpest decline in nearly a century. A revealing statistic showed that although in the early stages of the pandemic, whites fared better than other racial groups in maintaining their life expectancy, that pattern changed sharply in the second year, with whites experiencing a greater decline in life expectancy than did traditionally disadvantaged Blacks and other racial minorities.
To explain this discrepancy one need look no further than the anti-vaccine, anti-mask wearing movement which has had more success among whites, particularly those driven by libertarian, anti-government impulses, than it did among other racial cohorts. It is politically popular for Rand Paul to demonize Anthony Fauci, or for Dan Cox, the Republican candidate for governor in Maryland, to try to impeach the incumbent, a fellow Republican, for mandating measures to protect the public from COVID. The report shows the mortal cost to many culture warriors who buy into this madness.
COVID was the chief, but hardly the exclusive factor responsible for the stunning decline in life expectancy. Others included a profit-driven health system, an out-of-control gun culture, the poverty among too large a portion of the population that is the fruit of the inequality that continues to deepen in this country, and the worsening environment which climate deniers refuse to recognize as an existential threat to the public’s well-being.
What the report particularly drives home is the hard truth that policies, as well as the propaganda which drives them, have real life and death consequences at the most personal level. People are paying by a literal reduction of years of life expectancy for the policies and attitudes which they have allowed venal, power-hungry politicians to establish as the orthodox approach to governance.
Even more unsettling is the outlier status in life expectancy which now sets this country apart from all the other advanced countries in the world. That pariah status is the fruit of a culture that privileges private freedom over public health, that glorifies the hoarding of weapons and the proliferation of private armies as the best protector of home and the antidote for tyrannical government. A culture in which profits and shareholder returns are the paramount concerns in shaping goals for corporate America. No surprise that such an obsessive focus too often produces the worst social evils, from promoting drug addiction to maximizing incarceration in private prisons, to imperiling the planet by clinging to the mass usage of fossil fuels. We now have the clearest evidence of how deadly this culture is for the American people themselves.
Look on this report as the canary’s warning in the mine of America which decades of misrepresentation and misgovernment have rendered ripe for disaster. The National Center has done the nation a great service by showing in such compelling fashion the real-life consequences of demagogic policies and attitudes. Consider it a God-sent opportunity to take the necessary steps to reverse the tables of life expectancy and thus to strengthen our democracy by improving the general welfare. We can begin by putting into office those truly committed to making government not a cudgel to use against our enemies, but our main instrument for realizing the promise of American life which each generation strives to realize. For most of our nation’s history, the lengthening of life expectancy was part of that quest. Let us reclaim that legacy.
Robert Emmett Curran is professor of history emeritus at Georgetown University and author of the forthcoming “American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era.”