US Life Expectancy Has Declined Again. Neoliberalism and Antidemocratic Rule Are to Blame.
US life expectancy has declined for the second year in a row — a historic drop that hasn’t been seen for a century. We can thank our country’s threadbare welfare state and antidemocratic political institutions.
Nurses wheel out the body of a recently deceased patient on the COVID-19 floor at the West Roxbury VA Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, January 2021. (Erin Clark / The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
It doesn’t come as shock that, compared to peer countries, the United States is a less healthy, more dangerous place to live. But it’s still sobering to see the cold, hard numbers that prove it.
Earlier this week, the National Center for Health Statistics revealed in a study that the average life expectancy in the United States suffered a noticeable decline in 2021, from 77 to 76.1 years. It marks the second year in a row US life expectancy has fallen, according to the New York Times: in 2020, the average lifespan dipped from 78.8 to 77.
In other words, Americans have experienced a drop in life expectancy of almost three years since 2019 — a “historic” falloff, one of the study’s coauthors told the Times. The last time the United States saw such a sharp decline was about a hundred years ago, in 1923.
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