Figures for national life expectancy by country tend to be within bandwidths. At the moment, the US is relegated to the lower end by comparison with the rest of the world, one rank above Cuba. That is apparently supposed to be an improvement.
Inevitably, when the subject is the US, it instantly complicates. A good example of the complexities is this Lancet publication, Ten Americas: a systematic analysis of life expectancy disparities in the USA. The “Ten Americas” are socioeconomic, including race, geography, income, etc.
These are the natural statistical bases for any study of life expectancy. They’re not particularly surprising. What’s surprising is that these are unquestioned and accepted baseline demographics, and that they haven’t changed much, if at all, in many years.
The decline in US life expectancy is well documented, perhaps to the point of being too well documented and very predictable. The murderous US healthcare system is invariably singled out as a primary cause, but not so much statistically. Crime, poverty, opioids, and the pandemic are also built-in modifiers.
To be fair, these are hardly “cosmetic” stats. They are accurate, consistent, and put significant downward pressure on net life expectancy.
This is where some nitpicking is required. These “individual” factors are statistically atypical.
If your statistical entity is 100 people, and one is killed by an asteroid, does that lower life expectancy by 1%? Not really. The incident reflects a single statistical anomaly, unlikely to be repeated. Can that 1% be anything but an anomaly? Does it really reflect average life expectancy?
For example, several years after the pandemic, the average life expectancy in the US “rebounded”. Or did it? The US badly mismanaged the pandemic. Other countries did much better statistically. The various ups and downs of US life expectancy always suffer by comparison with other countries.
This suggests that these anomalies can be disproportionately applied to core life expectancy. Which is likely to be more dangerous over time, a pandemic or a totally dysfunctional health system? Another wonderful statistic, the ever-familiar “preventable deaths in US healthcare,” indicates that roughly the equivalent of a Vietnam War or two worth of deaths happens every year.
Now, a surprise – The UK was even worse regarding avoidable deaths. The many problems of the ever-neglected NHS are the likely scenarios for this catastrophic systemic failure.
In both cases, the anomalies are consistently and continuously dwarfed by system failures.
Please excuse what may seem to be over-simplistic and selective statistical citations and interpretations, but otherwise, you’d be reading an encyclopedia.
The point of all this is that some questions aren’t being asked or answered by stats:
Are the life expectancy stats on the right track or not?
Are the right issues being identified or not?
How do you turn such grim statistics into practical management tools?
What about deaths due solely to inability to access healthcare, healthcare insurance, and so on?
There’s another point here. Statistics aren’t gathered simply for entertainment value. They are supposed to be useful and used appropriately. They obviously aren’t.
None of these horrific numbers could possibly be any sort of surprise to health professionals.
These are the sort of stats that will definitely come looking for you. Ignorance is not an option.
Source: Digital Journal / Digpu NewsTex