There's something uncomfortably sterile about life-expectancy rates.
When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that American life expectancy shortened by a tenth of a year, as it did last year, it's forgivable if the problem isn't immediately obvious. Sure, we might have shaved off a little more than a month from our lifespans, but at the same time mortality rates for some of America's leading causes of death, including cancer, heart disease and kidney disease, are falling. What's the difference between 78.7 and 78.6 years?
But behind that loss--behind the clean bar charts and crisp CDC estimates--is the core of our country's most shameful social failures.
There are two primary forces behind our recent drop in life expectancy, both the result of systemic crises in the United States. The first, as many others have noted, is drug overdoses. Last year, a little more than 70,000 Americans succumbed to drug addiction, most from opioids such as heroin or painkillers.
The second force at play is the United States' gun epidemic. Firearm deaths aren't explicitly included in the CDC's latest numbers, but we can still find them. They are most clearly evident in the report's acknowledgment that rates of suicide, overwhelmingly committed by firearms, increased to new heights last year at 14 deaths per 100,000 people.
Editorial on 12/08/2018