Emergency U.S.A.

Adeep new dive into the data shows a cancer eating away at the nation. Death rates have of late been rising sharply for young and middle-aged Americans, a phenomenon that has now driven down life expectancy for three consecutive years.

This in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, the global center of medical innovation and a place that spends far more on health care than any other country. This at a time when other wealthy nations are continuing to see their people get healthier and live longer.

The question we must ask in light of the new research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association is a cry: Why?

We know well of the scourge of opioid addiction. Prescription pills, heroin, fentanyl: add them up and they now take more than 60,000 lives a year. Overall overdose deaths for those 25 to 64 are up nearly fourfold since 1999.

Alcohol abuse is claiming more victims, too. Liver disease deaths are up 40% since the turn of the millennium; liver cancer, 60%.

Suicide rates are up 24% over the same period.

Yet those answers to the question of why are only descriptive. The real question is what’s beneath the behavior driving those diagnoses.

Based on geographic distribution, researchers suspect economic and social woes associated with the hollowing out of manufacturing, mining and other blue-collar economies have played a powerful role.

There’s no readily available medicine here. But we can be certain ignoring hard truths is a sure way to exacerbate spiraling pain.