Trump's pandemic failures shaved years off our lives, study finds
What would you give for five more years?
Five years.
A baby born in the United States, in the year 2020, can expect to die five years sooner than her peers in other rich nations, according to new peer-reviewed research published in the BMJ, a leading medical journal.
For most of the second half of the twentieth century, Americans enjoyed longer life expectancies than citizens of countries like the U.K., Norway and France. But that advantage started to erode around 1980. Since 2000 we’ve had an expectancy deficit relative to our peers that’s shown no sign of relenting.
The latest research explores how the coronavirus pandemic affected these trends. In 2018, for instance, the life gap with our peers stood at around 3 years. By 2020 that gap had widened precipitously, to 4.7 years.
The reason for that, the researchers say, is the almost unfathomable loss of life the pandemic inflicted on us, a loss driven in large part by the bungling indifference of Joe Biden’s predecessor in the White House. Other wealthy democracies, with truly universal health care systems and pandemic responses that weren’t driven by the whims of an autocratic narcissist, typically fared better.
“These adverse outcomes [in the U.S.] are products of national, state, and local policy decisions, and actions and inactions that influenced viral transmission and management of the pandemic,” the authors conclude.
Letting more than half a million people die, in other words, was a policy choice. One that shaved nearly two years off the average American life.
But like everything else in the United States, that loss of life wasn’t distributed equally. Hispanic Americans lost nearly four years of life expectancy from 2018 to 2020, while Black lives were shortened by more than three years.
Minorities in other rich democracies fared much better.
“Among Black men and women in the US, the decrease in life expectancy between 2018 and 2020 was 12.3 times and 20.3 times greater, respectively, than the average decrease for men and women in peer countries,” the authors found. Being Black in America, in other words, is uniquely hazardous to your health. A Black male born in 2020 can now expect to live a little less than 68 years, a level last seen in 1998.
So here we are now, in 2021, living lives that are half a decade shorter than those in other rich places. What would you do with five extra years? Explore a little more of the world? Take up a hobby you never had time for? Spend more time with your pets, your spouse, your kids and grandkids?
Or maybe we should be posing the question to those people in other rich democracies — those that have functioning health care systems, and non-porous safety nets, and time off for vacations and illnesses and childbirth, and more equitable wealth redistribution. Ask a person from Norway: what would it take for you to give up five years of your life? Lower taxes? Cheaper burgers? More “freedom”?
It all seems incomprehensible until you remember that only poor and working-class Americans have to make this trade-off: the richest among us — those who can afford the healthcare and the good educations and the rest and relaxation — live lives that are comparable in length to those in Japan, Sweden and elsewhere. They reap all the benefits of our ruthless capitalist economy while paying none of the costs — quite literally, as it turns out.
And that’s the true value of money in American society: not that it buys you mansions or yachts or even power and influence, but rather the one thing that everyone, everywhere, desperately wants more of: time.
That's not what "life expectancy" means, and I think it's a shame that the measure has a such a misleading name. It's more like: the average life length of a person who lives every year of their life in 2020 (or a year identical to 2020). See Philip N Cohen's video explainer: https://twitter.com/familyunequal/status/1408161147619053568