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Why Is Life Expectancy In The US Lower Than In Other Rich Countries?

 

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Weekend Reading

California Leads U.S. Economy, Away From Trump
Researchers Have Answered A Big Question About The Decline Of The Middle Class
Who's Watching Wall Street? The Feds Turn A Blind Eye To Goldman's Game
Simple Math Is Why Elon Musk's Companies Keep Doing What Others Don't Even Consider Possible
A New Olympics Reality: Fewer Cities Want To Host The Games
See One Of The World's Rarest Cats Captured On Camera
Disturbing Photographs Show Pollution in the Great Lakes Before the Clean Water Act

A Call For Clean Water

Trump Announces Commission To Investigate His Baseless Widespread Voter Fraud Claim

U.S. life expectancy varies by more than 20 years from county to county

The Divergence of U.S. Healthcare

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Keep Republicans Away From Social Security

Here's yet another prime example of why Scott Walker and the Republican party are wrong for America.

Scott Walker Suggests Raising Age To Qualify For Social Security.

There is so much misinformation out there regarding Social Security. Much of it pushed by conservatives who would like to end the program.

For starters, hopefully everyone is aware that the current full Social Security retirement age (for those born after 1960) is 67.

As Ezra Klein stated:

But “cutting” Social Security is unpopular and people don’t like to talk about it. So folks who want to cut the program have instead settled on an elliptical argument about life expectancy. Social Security, they say, was designed at a time when Americans didn’t live quite so long. And so raising the retirement age isn’t a “cut.” It’s a restoration of the program’s original purpose. It doesn’t hurt anything or anyone. 

The first point worth making here is that the country’s economy has grown 15-fold since Social Security was passed into law. One of the things the richest society the world has ever known can buy is a decent retirement for people who don’t have jobs they love and who don’t want to work forever. 

The second point worth making is that Social Security was overhauled in the ’80s. So the promises the program is carrying out today were made then. And, since the ’80s, the idea that we’ve all gained so many years of life simply isn’t true…. 

[S]ince 1977, the life expectancy of male workers retiring at age 65 has risen six years in the top half of the income distribution. But if you’re in the bottom half of the income distribution? Then you’ve only gained 1.3 years.

Christian Weller adds:

Workers who have paid into Social Security have to wait until a specific age before they can receive full retirement benefits. In the past, the full retirement age was 65, but it has been gradually increasing and will eventually reach 67 for people born in 1960 and later. Retirees can still claim Social Security at age 62, but their benefits will be reduced significantly if they do. These permanent benefit reductions are greater the earlier somebody claims Social Security and the higher the full retirement benefit age is. Some conservatives, including Cruz and Paul as well as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, have now called for raising the full retirement benefit age even further –- for instance, to 69 years. This translates into across-the-board benefit cuts due to Social Security’s formula, which yields a larger amount for every month a worker delays claiming retirement benefits up to age 70. And it translates into especially deep cuts for workers who must retire early. These cuts are particularly harmful to lower-income workers and people of color.

David Rosnick and Dean Baker have found that increasing the Social Security qualification age also increases inequality:

The full retirement age for Social Security benefits – originally 65 – is currently 66 years, and is scheduled to increase over the next 15 years to age 67 for workers born in 1960 and later. Every year of increase in this “normal” retirement age (NRA) is equivalent to a cut in benefits of 6-7 percent.1 Despite this increase, there has been discussion of raising the retirement age even further – to 69, 70, or even higher.

Rosnick and Baker, in their research, also address the falsities regarding solvency and life expectancy:

The primary justification for such an increase is that the Social Security Trust Fund faces a looming shortfall. Yet the Congressional Budget Office projects that Social Security will be able to pay all promised benefits through 2038.2 Thereafter, even with no changes whatsoever, Social Security will be able to pay more than 80 percent of benefits until 2070. Under current law, a young worker planning to retire at age 70 will receive a monthly benefit 24 percent larger than if the same worker retired at age 67. However, those credits for delayed retirement would be eliminated if the retirement age were increased to 70, resulting in a 19 percent cut in benefits. In addition, workers who start collecting benefits at an earlier age would see a reduction in benefits of roughly 18 percent compared to current law.

Another justification for an increase in the retirement age is that life expectancy is increasing, and the retirement age has not kept up. But this makes little sense when discussing workers in physically demanding jobs who are often unable to continue working into their late 60s. Additionally, as we reported in earlier work, there has been considerable widening of the gap in life expectancy between high- and low-income workers. As a result, the already-scheduled increase in the retirement age has effectively wiped out the gains in expected years of retirement (if workers retire at NRA) for males in the bottom half of the income distribution.

Paul Krugman elaborates:

Start with Mr. Christie, who thought he was being smart and brave by proposing that we raise the age of eligibility for both Social Security and Medicare to 69. Doesn’t this make sense now that Americans are living longer? 

No, it doesn’t. This whole line of argument should have died in 2007, when the Social Security Administration issued a report showing that almost all the rise in life expectancy has taken place among the affluent. The bottom half of workers, who are precisely the Americans who rely on Social Security most, have seen their life expectancy at age 65 rise only a bit more than a year since the 1970s. Furthermore, while lawyers and politicians may consider working into their late 60s no hardship, things look somewhat different to ordinary workers, many of whom still have to perform manual labor. 

And while raising the retirement age would impose a great deal of hardship, it would save remarkably little money. In fact, a 2013 report from the Congressional Budget Office found that raising the Medicare age would save almost no money at all.

The bottom line is that we all need to be very leery of Republicans claiming to have the best interests of social programs at heart when they propose increasing eligibility ages, reducing payouts or any of their other trojan horses. Social Security is too important to be left to the whims and disproven ideas of Republican apparatchiks.

For Further Reading:

Social Security

Social Security

Social Security

Health Care Scandal Hype

Veterans and Zombies: The Hype Behind the Health Care Scandal

Excerpt:

So here’s what you need to know: It’s still true that Veterans Affairs provides excellent care, at low cost. Those waiting lists arise partly because so many veterans want care, but Congress has provided neither clear guidelines on who is entitled to coverage, nor sufficient resources to cover all applicants. And, yes, some officials appear to have responded to incentives to reduce waiting times by falsifying data. 

Yet, on average, veterans don’t appear to wait longer for care than other Americans. And does anyone doubt that many Americans have died while waiting for approval from private insurers? 

A scandal is a scandal, and wrongdoing must be punished. But beware of people trying to use the veterans’ care scandal to derail health reform. 

And here’s the thing: Health reform is working. Too many Americans still lack good insurance, and hence lack access to health care and protection from high medical costs — but not as many as last year, and next year should be better still. Health costs are still far too high, but their growth has slowed dramatically. We’re moving in the right direction, and we shouldn’t let the zombies get in our way.

For Further Reading:
The Best Care Anywhere

Midweek Reading

You Give Religions More Than $82.5 Billion A Year

Walmart's Latest Scheme - Replace The Middle Class With An Underclass Forced To Buy It's Shoddy Goods

This year, Walmart is back with a new "Buy America" program. In January, the company announced that it would purchase an additional $50 billion worth of domestic goods over the next decade. This week, Walmart is convening several hundred suppliers, along with a handful of governors, for a summit on U.S. manufacturing .

This sounds pretty substantial, but in fact it's just a more sophisticated and media savvy version of Walmart's hollow 1980s Buy America campaign. For starters, $50 billion over a decade may sound huge at first, but measured against Walmart's galactic size, it's not. An additional $5 billion a year amounts to only 1.5 percent of what Walmart currently spends on inventory.

Worse, very little of this small increase in spending on American-made goods will actually result in new U.S. production and jobs. Most of the projected increase will simply be a byproduct of Walmart's continued takeover of the grocery industry. Most grocery products sold in the U.S. are produced here. As Walmart expands its share of U.S. grocery sales — it now captures 25 percent, up from 6 percent in 1998 — it will buy more U.S. foods. But this doesn't mean new jobs, because other grocers are losing market share and buying less. What it does mean is lower wages. As I reported earlier this year, Walmart's growing control of the grocery sector is pushing down wages throughout food production ...

In a way, Walmart's Buy America program represents the home stretch of the economic transformation the company set in motion decades ago, when it set out to replace the American middle class, rooted in small business ownership and unionized jobs, with a vast underclass that has little choice but to rely on theshoddy, short-lived products sold at big-box stores to get by.

The Reason Americans Are Less Healthy Than Other Developed Nations 

Back in 1990, shouts a new study just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the United States ranked a lowly 20th on life expectancy among 34 major industrial nations. The United States now ranks 27th — despite spending much more on health care than any other nation... 

Just how does inequality translate into unhealthy outcomes? Growing numbers of researchers see stress as the culprit. The more inequality in a society, the more stress. Chronic stress, over time, wears down our immune systems and leaves us more vulnerable to disease.