Why are so many Americans dying early?

Post Reports

The Washington Post

Daily News, Politics, News

4.4 • 5.1K Ratings

🗓️ 8 November 2023

⏱️ 27 minutes

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Summary

Despite spending more per person on health care than any other nation, the United States has a crisis of premature deaths. The Post’s health team has been investigating why that is, and today we learn how politics, stress and chronic illness play a role.

The United States was once on a track to reach an average life expectancy of 80, but after decades of progress, we’re falling further and further behind.

The Washington Post spent the past year examining why this is happening. Our reporters and editors have analyzed death records from five decades and spoke to scores of clinicians, patients and researchers in the United States and abroad.

“One of the best quotes we had in the series was, if we came in last in the Olympics, how would we react?” said data reporter Dan Keating. “We're coming in last in the Olympics of staying alive.”

Today, we hear from Keating about what the data reveals. Then we turn to Akilah Johnson to hear about how stress and weathering play a role. And finally, we turn to Dan Diamond, who looked at how red-state politics are shaving years off Americans’ lives.

Plug your age and gender into our life expectancy calculator to compare yourself with peers overseas. Find out why so many do better than in the United States.

Transcript

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0:00.0	One of the best quotes we had in the series was if we came in last in the Olympics, how would we react?
0:08.0	And we're coming in last in the Olympics of staying alive.
0:14.0	For the last year, Dan Keating has been thinking a lot about life expectancy in America.
0:19.0	He's a data reporter at the post, and he kept on covering this troubling trend, which is that people here are dying too soon, despite the United States spending more per person on health care than any other country in the world.
0:34.0	We're the worst of among our peers by far.
0:37.0	So we had been about average among this group of about 25, 26 nations.
0:42.4	And by the late 20 teens, we were by far the worst.
0:47.6	Dan rallied a group of health reporters to investigate, and they found that something changed in the US in the last 40 years.
0:55.0	There was really no difference in death rates between the richest and poorest counties in the US back in 1980.
1:02.0	And over the 40 years that steadily
1:05.3	steadily grew and before the pandemic it was a very large gap and then in the
1:09.9	pandemic once again it expanded water and that just shocked me I did not
1:13.4	expect to see that it was that somehow over 40 years our system had become much more
1:21.1	discriminating in terms of keeping people alive who have a certain amount of income and not people who don't.
1:30.0	From the Newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post Reports.
1:34.0	I'm Alana Gordon, your guest host today.
1:36.7	It's Wednesday, November 8th.
1:38.9	Today, we interrogate what is cutting our lives short in the US. First, we hear more from
1:44.8	Dan Keating about what exactly the data is revealing. Then we'll turn to the
1:49.4	posts Aquila Johnson about one of the surprising factors she discovered behind all of this, one that's taking an especially heavy toll on our bodies.
1:59.0	Finally, we hear from Dan Diamond about how Red State politics are shaving years off our lives.
2:09.6	Okay, back to the data. As Stan took a closer look at these numbers, he saw one data point
	...

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