By
Howard Bloom
Australia has us beat.
When it comes to how long you can expect to live, you’d expect America to come out on top. Far from it.
In a new study of life-expectancy in six English-speaking countries, America does not come in first, second, or even third. We come in last. Dead last.
The new study, which appeared in the British Medical Journal in July. used “the Human Mortality Database, the [World Health Organization’s] WHO Mortality Database and the vital statistics” from what it called the “agencies of six high-income Anglophone countries” to survey longevity trends from 1990 to 2018 zeroing in on what it calls “six high-income Anglophone countries (USA, UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand).”
The new study covered roughly half a billion people. And its results were a wakeup call for us Americans.
Australian men live 81.5 years on average, and Australian women live 84.5 years. American men live a mere 76.5 years, and American women live 81.5 years. In other words, Australian men outlive American men by five years. That’s a whopping half a decade. And Australian women outlive our women by four full years.
In fact, we are behind Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and way behind the champion, Australia.
What accounts for Australia’s blazing success and our miserable failure?
Australia has what Bernie Sanders calls Healthcare for All and what Australians call Medicare. It has a solid, high-quality health-care system that takes care of every Australian citizen, no matter how rich or poor.
In addition, Australians have lower levels of obesity. Obesity leads to killers like diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.
What’s more, Australian citizens have a healthier diet, eating lots of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.
Australian women giving birth and the babies they give birth to are more likely to live through the birthing experience.
Australians also have access to free, quality education. Education is linked to a longer life.
And Australians have a strong social safety net, including cash payments and other forms of support to youth, to parents, and to the elderly. Not to mention public housing, housing support for those outside of public housing, and subsidized in-home care and stays in assisted-care and nursing facilities for elders.
There’s one more little trick. 30% of Australians are immigrants from countries like England, New Zealand, China, and India. And Australia’s immigrants outlive native Australians.
What are we Americans getting wrong? We are making guns easy to get. Which leads to more than just murders. It leads to people shooting themselves. It leads to suicide.
We are also driving dangerously. We are smoking. We are drinking too much alcohol. And some of us are addicted to opioids.
Can we Americans get out of our longevity crisis and lengthen Americans’ lives? Yes, it can be done.
The Irish have shown how. They’ve lengthened the average lifespan of their men by an astonishing 8.29 years and their women by 6.66 years since 1990. How?
By improving their health care system, clamping down on smoking, increasing highway safety, improving tech infrastructure, lowering corporate tax rates, and attracting foreign companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon to set up headquarters in Ireland. Not to mention bringing in the headquarters of five global drug companies, five global banks, four medical device companies, and a bunch of household-name corporations like PepsiCo, Kraft-Heinz, and Nestle.
Yes, we can lengthen American lives. But it may take a mix of two opposites: capitalism and socialism.
References:
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/14/7/e079365
https://studyfinds.org/americans-dying-younger
______
Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. One of his eight books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. His work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. He does news commentary at 1:06 am Eastern Time every Wednesday night on 545 radio stations on the highest-rated overnight syndicated talk radio show in North America, Coast to Coast AM. For more, see http://howardbloom.net.