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Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
"Our leaders must act to kick insurance companies to the curb and enact Medicare for All now," said one advocate.
Single-payer advocates on Thursday pointed to new federal life expectancy data—which shows Americans live shorter lives than people in any other major most-developed nation—as the latest proof of the need to enact a Medicare for All-type universal healthcare program.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), U.S. life expectancy was 77.5 years in 2022, an increase of 1.1 years from the previous year. The leading U.S. causes of death in 2022 were heart disease, cancer, unintentional injuries, and Covid-19.
The 2022 figures reversed two consecutive years of declining U.S. life expectancy, largely due to Covid-19, which has killed nearly 1.2 million people in the country. However, U.S. life expectancy in 2022 was still below its pre-pandemic high of 78.8 years in 2019.
"Despite spending the most per capita on healthcare, we have a consistently lower life expectancy than our peers in comparably wealthy countries."
"While it is good news that U.S. life expectancy is finally rising again, it is important to remember that despite spending the most per capita on healthcare, we have a consistently lower life expectancy than our peers in comparably wealthy countries with universal healthcare," said Eagan Kemp, the healthcare policy advocate at Public Citizen.
The United States is the only developed nation in the world without guaranteed universal healthcare.
"We must keep making the point that profit-driven healthcare is not only worse for patients—it's a national embarrassment," Kemp added. "Our leaders must act to kick insurance companies to the curb and enact Medicare for All now."
One 2022 study found that more than 338,000 U.S. Covid-19 deaths could have been prevented if the country had a single-payer universal healthcare system like Medicare for All.
While opponents—including U.S. lawmakers who take substantial donations from the for-profit healthcare and insurance industry—often argue that Medicare for All would be too expensive, a 2020 Congressional Budget Office analysis found that such a program would save between $300 billion and $650 billion annually.
The same study found that approximately 68,000 people die each year in the United States because they lack access to healthcare.
Meanwhile, millions of American families face bankruptcy and financial ruin due to healthcare expenses, as the CEOs of 300 major U.S. healthcare companies made $4.5 billion in collective compensation in 2022.
The United States has the lowest life expectancy of any large rich country while spending far more on healthcare than comparable nations. Figures vary by source and year, but according to the 2023 edition of the CIA Factbook, the U.S. ranked 48th in worldwide life expectancy, while 2021 World Bank figures place the U.S. in 59th place globally, between Algeria and Panama.
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) last year led more than 120 lawmakers in reintroducing bicameral Medicare for All legislation.
"There is a solution to this health crisis—a popular one that guarantees healthcare to every person as a human right and finally puts people over profits and care over corporations," Jayapal said at the time. "That solution is Medicare for All—everyone in, nobody out."
The American left should take note, both for the greater good and for its own political future. You can’t save the marginalized by tinkering around the margins.
From The Economist, September 28, 2023: "Living to 120 is becoming an imaginable prospect."
From The Washington Post, October 3, 2023: "An epidemic of chronic illness is killing Americans in their prime."
When it comes to social insurance, the Post is hardly a leftist publication. Its editorial page routinely inveighs against Social Security and Medicare “entitlements.” That makes the lede to its October 3rd story even more striking. It begins, “The United States is failing at a fundamental mission — keeping people alive.”
At roughly the same time, The Economist tells us that “after years of false starts, the idea of a genuine elixir of longevity is taking wing. Behind it is a coterie of fascinated and ambitious scientists and enthusiastic and self-interested billionaires.”
The neoliberalist house organ notes that “some people, observing billionaires’ interest in longevity-promoting startups, worry that the benefits will be captured mainly by the rich, leading to a class of long-lived Übermenschen lording it over short-lived ordinary folk.”
Stuff and nonsense, scoffs the British mag. It reassures us that “technologies have a record of spreading, and cheapening as they do so.” That will come as news to poor people of the United States, whose lives are growing shorter and shorter.
Live to 120? There are counties in the United States where you’re beating the odds if you make it past 70. The majorities in these counties may be White, Black, or Native American. But each suffers from poverty, a shortage of healthcare options, and a needlessly complex insurance system. while racism, ageism, and regional animosities compound the mortality crisis.
The system’s complexity is largely an artifact of for-profit insurance, for-profit pharmaceuticals, and, increasingly, for-profit medical offices. The Post tells us of one chronic-disease sufferer:
After he stopped working about seven years ago, he briefly qualified for Medicaid. But then he began collecting Social Security at 62, and his income exceeded the Medicaid eligibility limit. Next, he moved to an Affordable Care Act plan. Bouncing from plan to plan, he negotiated the complexities of being in-network or out-of-network ...
This is neoliberalism in a nutshell.
The Economist assures us that longevity science will be democratically applied: “It is hard to imagine a privilege more likely to spark rebellion than a ruling class that hoards age-treatments to escape the great leveller.” But the age-extending treatments we have today—for cardiovascular disease, for asthma, for cancer—are already being hoarded, albeit in less obvious ways. That’s why the once-small death gap between poor and wealthier regions has grown so dramatically. As the Post writes:
Sickness and death are scarring entire communities in much of the country. The geographical footprint of early death is vast: In a quarter of the nation’s counties, mostly in the South and Midwest, working-age people are dying at a higher rate than 40 years ago.
The rebellion is overdue.
Or is it? Look at the counties that are hardest hit by the mortality crisis:
The purplest counties on the map correspond pretty closely to support for Donald Trump and the far right. That may not have been the rebellion The Economist was talking about, but it’s a rebellion all the same.
The Post writes:
Forty years ago, small towns and rural regions were healthier for adults in the prime of life. The reverse is now true. Urban death rates have declined sharply, while rates outside the country’s largest metro areas flattened and then rose. Just before the pandemic, adults 35 to 64 in the most rural areas were 45 percent more likely to die each year than people in the largest urban centers.
The American left should take note, both for the greater good and for its own political future. The Electoral College and the Senate, both artifacts of slavery, give disproportionate political power to voters in the very areas hit hardest by death inequality. Yes, Democrats took some steps to address the crisis, but the fact remains: it kept getting worse during the Clinton and Obama years.
Bold action is needed to save lives—not “bold” as in “here’s something complicated and incremental that may help you in 2026,” but “bold” as in Medicare for All. It’s not enough to take a victory lap for past accomplishments, because those accomplishments haven’t stopped the dying. You can’t save the marginalized by tinkering around the margins.
What was the line that Ted Sorenson or someone wrote for John F. Kennedy? Oh, right: “Those who make peaceful evolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.”
We’ve been warned.
"Poverty should be considered a major risk factor for death in the U.S.," argues a new analysis.
Research published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association estimated that poverty was linked to at least 183,000 deaths in the United States in 2019 among people aged 15 or older, making inadequate income the nation's fourth-leading mortality driver that year behind heart disease, cancer, and smoking.
“Poverty kills as much as dementia, accidents, stroke, Alzheimer's, and diabetes," said David Brady, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Riverside and the lead author of the new analysis.
"Poverty silently killed 10 times as many people as all the homicides in 2019," Brady continued. "And yet, homicide, firearms, and suicide get vastly more attention."
Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, wrote Wednesday that the research underlines the importance of connecting "extremists' inaction" on gun violence to "other forms of policy murder."
The new analysis, co-authored by Ulrich Kohler of the University of Potsdam in Germany and Hui Zheng of Ohio State University, stressed that the U.S. "perennially has a far higher poverty rate than peer-rich democracies," which "presents an enormous challenge to population health given that considerable research demonstrates that being in poverty is bad for one's health."
Poverty, which the study defined as less than half the median U.S. income, was "associated with greater mortality than many far more visible causes in 2019—10 times as many deaths as homicide, 4.7 times as many deaths as firearms, 3.9 times as many deaths as suicide, and 2.6 times as many deaths as drug overdose."
"Because the U.S. consistently has high poverty rates, these estimates can contribute to understanding why the U.S. has comparatively lower life expectancy."
The researchers argued their results indicate that "poverty should be considered a major risk factor for death in the U.S.," which has seen life expectancy decline since 2015—and fall sharply amid the coronavirus pandemic.
"Because the U.S. consistently has high poverty rates, these estimates can contribute to understanding why the U.S. has comparatively lower life expectancy," the researchers wrote. "Because certain ethnic and racial minority groups are far more likely to be in poverty, our estimates can improve understanding of ethnic and racial inequalities in life expectancy."
"The mortality associated with poverty is also associated with enormous economic costs," they continued. "Therefore, benefit-cost calculations of poverty-reducing social policies should incorporate the benefits of lower mortality. Moreover, poverty likely aggravated the mortality impact of Covid-19, which occurred after our analyses ended in 2019. Therefore, one limitation of this study is that our estimates may be conservative about the number of deaths associated with poverty."
The onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 brought about a sharp increase in U.S. poverty as millions of people got sick, were thrown out of work, and lost health insurance.
But federal aid initiatives enacted in response to the public health and economic crisis—from stimulus checks to boosted unemployment benefits to enhanced nutrition assistance—ultimately led to a significant drop in poverty, further bolstering the case that "poverty is a policy choice."
However, many of those poverty-reducing aid programs, including the enhanced Child Tax Credit that sharply slashed poverty among kids in the U.S., have since lapsed or been terminated, threatening to reverse any recent progress.
Brady said in a statement that if the U.S. had less poverty, "there'd be a lot better health and well-being, people could work more, and they could be more productive."
"All of those," he added, "are benefits of investing in people through social policies."