Scary news
Chronic illness sucks
I managed to find my keys and phone inside the car while I was outside this morning—with the doors locked, of course. I had run out for an errand that should have been quick by wasn’t. Thank goodness the skies set me up for a beautiful day this morning. I operate by habit so I am not sure how the lock triggered but lo and behold, it did.
The Washington Post had two extended articles in the Sunday paper, one on Jim Jordan’s career and wrestling and the other on the depressing news that our health failing substantially as we witness declining life expectancy.
An observation on life expectancy influenced me to retire sixteen months ago. The average worker retires at 67 while the average life expectancy is 78, thus the average person works for half a century to enjoy eleven years’ retirement. And that is average which means people are well above that and some well below.
Three of my grandparents passed away well before my birth, two in their forties and the third in his sixties. I imagine they did not expect that the first sentence of today’s Post article would be ‘The United States is failing at a fundamental mission-keeping alive’.
The penultimate sentence on the front page is stark. ‘While opioids and gun violence have rightly seized the public’s attention, stealing hundreds of thousands of lives, chronic diseases are the greatest threat, killing far more people between 35 and 64 every year’.
Chronic illnesses include cancers, asthma, diabetes, liver disease, and so many others, all outpaced by chronic heart disease. While we spend more on medical care than any other country, these chronic illnesses are increasing for people in middle age. Younger Americans are developing these problems without solutions to end them.
While smoking has declined, we dis-incentivise tobacco through taxation. ‘Sin taxes’ are inherently regressive, so they hit those least able to pay them because of their incomes. I cannot help but note the irony that many folks in red states who most oppose paying taxes to Washington are willing and able to pay taxes for cigarettes from a young age.
Yet our country still allows businesses to sell a known carcinogen and addictive commodity to our citizens for consumption. What is wrong with this picture?
The chronic illnesses are disproportionately hard on those of lower incomes in the United States. The wealth gap has all sorts of effects. Those less able to pay for increasingly expensive long-term heath interventions in the private health care are dying earlier.
This is a depressing topic but one we cannot ignore. Health care is one of the items in our budget that continues outpacing inflation.
Other states once so far behind us have better health outcomes today. Since those countries spend less on medical interventions, one has to wonder how and why things continue declining here when one considers how much we spend on that sector of the economy, whether private or public.
Are we misjudging where we are investing in medical research? Are we doing too little on prevention? Is there something we could do differently to educate to focus on meaningful prevention? Why are others more successful at extending life as we were for so many years of our history? Have we done something to our genes? Or, are we overestimating our ability to control things as Americans so often do?
All of these questions are beyond my ability to answer. They may be the wrong questions, though this is an extensive expose’. I recommend thinking about this question because there is a delicate yet complex interplay between so many different elements of longevity. And so few of us have the analytical background to sort through the questions in a solid manner.
Is our focus on national security all wrong? Is national security really more about individual health over the middle years of their lives? Should we focus on keeping Americans healthy rather than on external actors about whom we think we know more than perhaps we do?
With someone in my family thankfully celebrating an 80th birthday this year, I am so aware of life’s fragility as we age.
I don’t know but the sobering reality of today’s longevity numbers is not what my grandparents anticipated a century ago, I suspect. Life isn’t always irreversible progress but this problem of declining longevity is a wake up of epic proportions.
What will work?
Thank you for reading these musing today. Please send me your responses. If you think appropriate, please circulate this further.
Be well and be safe. FIN
Joel Achenbach, Dan Keating, Laurie McGinley, Akilah Johnson and Jahi Chikewendiu, ‘Cronic Illinesses Are Killing Us Too Soon’., The Washington Post, 22 October 2023, pp. A1, A 16-20.