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Comment by fooker | Hacker News Reader

> US life expectancy has declined over the past three years

Do you have a source for this ?

There was a big dip in 2021, but it has started rising again, and it's possible it might rendezvous again with the old trend. This means parent-poster might be technically correct in the sense of "between T to T+3 it decreased", but I would not jump straight to blaming the the longer-term background horribleness of US health insurance for it.

It's far more likely to be that teensy-weensy COVID-19 pandemic, both in terms of direct damage and also reduced care for everything else.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/21/cdc-us-life-expecta...

Covid and opioid deaths. Opioids are bad. To quote the lancet “Opioid overdose mortality rates are alarmingly high, but measures based on death counts alone do not fully capture the impact of this crisis as they do not account for the young age at which most opioid-related deaths occur…” (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanam/article/PIIS2667-19...)

The particular article found opioid deaths lowered life expectancy by 0.67 years, which is a crazy number.

Drug overdose deaths finally seem to be trending down in 2024, but they are still elevated and awful.

> Opioids are bad.

Years of life aren't the most important thing. Opiods might reduce life expectancy but increase the averge quality of life of those living in a given year.

For those using them according to prescriptions maybe, sure. But the opioid crisis isn't an opioid crisis because people are using them according to what their doc told them. It's a crisis because they are abused.

https://www.google.com/search?q=us%20life%20expectancy%20&ie...

Quick googling shows that WHO/World Bank at least.

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