The US v. the developed world Part II

When I wrote about this general subject this morning I hadn’t seen this fascinating piece, published yesterday in the Financial Times (thanks to several commenters for flagging it).

Some key points:

(1) There’s a massive life expectancy gap between England and the US, that is consistent at every income level, with the exception of the very top 1% of the distribution. This is all the more striking given that household income levels are much higher in the US than in England.

(2) This gap is completely accounted for by the much higher annual mortality risk faced by young and middle-aged Americans (the annual mortality risk of old Americans is basically indistinguishable from that of comparable people in developed nations).

(3) People in what is by far the poorest, most deprived, and most drug-plagued area of England (Blackpool) now have the same life expectancy as the average American, and vastly better health than people in West Virginia:

The most startling aspect of all this is the extent to which these astonishing gaps are not COVID-driven, but rather a product of an epidemic of drug overdose deaths, gun violence, suicide, and alcohol-abuse related maladies, i.e., what Anne Case and Angus Deaton identified as “deaths of despair” a decade ago.

Here’s a statistic that captures these trends:

Annual mortality risk for 25-34 year olds in the US, per 100,000:

2003: 102

First quarter of 2022: 182

You have to go back to 1949 (!) to find the last time the annual mortality risk for young American adults was that high, at a time when the age-adjusted mortality risk for the population as a whole was literally more than double what it was in 2019 (1,453/100,000 v. 715/100,000).

These are the symptoms of very serious social breakdown. And it’s hardly a coincidence that the one American age cohort subjected to the horrors of socialized medicine — the elderly — is the only cohort that has health outcomes that are as good as those found in countries that don’t have Freedom ™.

ETA: I should have noted that England doesn’t have particularly good health statistics compared to the rest of Western Europe, where many countries have considerably better stats.