Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/10/29/1518393112.full.pdf
This paper documents a marked increase in the all-cause mortality of middle-aged white non-Hispanic men and women in the United States between 1999 and 2013. This change reversed decades of progress in mortality and was unique to the United States; no other rich country saw a similar turnaround.
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Midlife increases in suicides and drug poisonings have been previously noted. However, that these upward trends were persistent and large enough to drive up all-cause midlife mortality has, to our knowledge, been overlooked. If the white mortality rate for ages 45?54 had held at their 1998 value, 96,000 deaths would have been avoided from 1999–2013, 7,000 in 2013 alone. If it had continued to decline at its previous (1979‒1998) rate, half a million deaths would have been avoided in the period 1999‒2013, comparable to lives lost in the US AIDS epidemic through mid-2015.
Concurrent declines in self-reported health, mental health, and ability to work, increased reports of pain, and deteriorating measures of liver function all point to increasing midlife distress.
Comment by Don McCanne of PNHP: In recent years concerns have been raised about the increases in death rates from prescription pain medications, but the magnitude of the problem was not recognized until this landmark study was released yesterday. Midlife deaths from poisonings with alcohol and drugs or from suicide of white, non-Hispanic men and women in the United States have skyrocketed since 1999. Morbidity likewise has increased in this group.
The intensity of the problem can be easily visualized by clicking on the link above and looking at Figure 1. The mortality curve of US white non-Hispanics, ages 45-54, is moving upward as the curves for US Hispanics and for residents of six other wealthy industrialized nations are continuing downward.
Although the other nations have more egalitarian, accessible and affordable health care systems, that alone cannot explain the differences since Hispanics in the United States have not seen this same isolated increase in mortality.
The authors suggest that the decline in economic security that began in the early 1970s may be an important factor. Not only have wages stagnated, but retirement security has diminished with a shift from defined benefit to defined contribution pension plans. Lack of higher education has been especially associated with this phenomenon of higher mid-life morbidity and mortality.
A single payer system would help by improving access to preventive health, mental health, and drug treatment services. But we need to do more. We need public policies that distribute the gains in productivity to the workers rather than to the rentiers, plus tax policies that reduce the injustices of income and wealth inequality. We need to ensure adequate education opportunities for all, including industrial arts and training for the service industries, along with assurances of adequate incomes in those fields. In general, we need policies that serve the social good.
To do that we need political leaders who are dedicated to the health and welfare of the people and who would enact policies to ensure that. We need to displace our current political leaders who have dedicated themselves to supporting the military-industrial complex (through more warfare), the medical-industrial complex (through prioritizing support of insurers and pharmaceutical firms above the interests of patients), and the rentiers of Wall Street who are redistributing wealth from the masses to the magnates.
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