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The United States's middle aged white death rates have been going up and up. [1]

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Date: 2023-11-12

I am a retired demographer and was playing with mortality data when I found that state politics have become a major factor in explaining our abnormally high middle age death rates. Here I have focused on one of the most abnormal sets of our mortality data, white middle aged death rates. In all the the other economically developed countries the middle age death rates have been close to consistently declining for over a century. The major exceptions outside the United States have been during some epidemics and wars.

The graph on the top of this page comes close to showing the same pattern found in graphs displaying death rates in most of the economically developed countries. There are two major differences. First, I have found no other analysis that looks at death rates by political party in power. The recent part of the top graph shows the emergence of party differences death rates, I will suggest a cause after I discuss the next graph. The major difference between this graph and similar one for other economically developed countries is the flat section in the second fourth of this graph time wise. All the other countries I have seen have a continuous decline that shows the most desirable result of health care research. Clearly science is working when it comes to delaying human deaths.

Now the next graph, it shows the same thing for the age group 25-54, or we can say the middle aged.

This pattern shows that changes in middle age white death rates is different. The effect of political parties are much stronger with the largest increase in death rates among non-Hispanic whites living in Republican voting states. These middle aged death rates increase the least in Democratic voting states and the mixed party states are in the middle. Now while in the middle age group whites living in Democratic voting states are doing much better than those in mixed party and Republican voting states, none of the middle aged groups had the nearly constant declining death rate since 1999 that the elderly experienced. Also, in the middle age groups the effect of including Hispanics produces a substantially larger reduction in death rates than it has among the elderly. Since it is during increasing death rates this means the non-Hispanic white death rates are increasing while the Hispanic white death rates are not.

The next thing I will report here is estimates of the excess deaths in the middle age groups. To do this I calculated the annual percent decline in each of the three politically grouped states of the elderly whites from 1999 through 2019. I then used those percent changes to predict the number of age 25 through 54 deaths each politically grouped sets of states would have had if their middle aged experienced the same yearly percent change as their elderly. Since almost every improvement that lowers the death rate is more effective among younger people, these estimates are conservative.

First the Republican voting states: From 1999 through 2020 the 25 through 54 non-Hispanic whites in Republican voting states experienced 1,455,692 deaths. If their death rates had changed the same each year as their aged 65 through 84, they would have had 345,102, that is 23.7 percent, fewer deaths.

Second the mixed party voting states: From 1999 through 2020 the same group here experienced 1,455,721 deaths and if their middle aged had experienced their elderly’s declining rates 335,231 of those deaths, 23.0 percent, would not have occurred.

Finally, the Democratic voting states, their age 25 through 54 non-Hispanic whites experienced 1,469,621 actual deaths, if they had experienced the same declining death rates that their aged 65 through 84 had, they would have experienced 491,144 or 33.4 percent fewer deaths. This number is larger because the elderly death rate in the Democratic voting states declined substantially more than it did in the other two groups of states.

I will conclude with a reference to countries life expectancy ranked by the CIA www.cia.gov/… In this table the United States is ranked 48th while Canada is ranked 6th and this is while we spend almost exactly twice as much for health care as Canadians do, we could probably save a lot of money doing it. About twenty years ago both Canada and the United States were near where Canada is now and over the last couple of decades the United States has gone down close to one place per year while Canada has stayed close to where it was back then. The above graphs show that most of the increases in our death rates have been in the ages covered by private health insurance. I think Medicare for all would put us on course to be up next to Canada in life expectancy and down close to what they are paying for health carein a few years.

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