Public health emergency

A new study has uncovered a disturbing new trend: The nation’s least-educated whites are suffering a decline in life expectancy.

It had been previously known that the well-educated were reaping a disproportionate share of the nation’s advancing life expectancy.

But the new study, published in August in Health Affairs, disclosed that the life expectancy for the least-educated whites actually declined by four years between 1990 and 2008. (The life expectancy of Hispanics and blacks is rising.)

That’s a huge drop in a relatively short period of time.

For white women without a high school diploma, the decline was five years.

As reported by The New York Times, the cause of the decline is not known, but possible explanations include: a rise in prescription drug overdoses among young whites; high rates of smoking among less-educated, white women; an increasing rate of obesity; and an increasing trend among the poorly educated to lack health insurance.

The loss of life expectancy is not evenly distributed across the nation.

Where researchers have plotted on a map changes in life expectancy from data for 1987 to 2007 among women generally -- not specifically white or lesseducated -- a geographic pattern emerges. The decline generally is most pronounced in impoverished, rural areas of Appalachia and central and southeastern United States, with a few pockets in the West.

For perspective, the five-year drop for poorly educated, white women is close to the seven-year drop in life expectancy among Russian men after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This is happening not in the wreckage of an exhausted empire, but in the United States of America, which, we’ve been told over and over again by those who resist change, has the greatest health care system in the world. (Stipulated, repetition of that trope does not make it true.)

It’s not an exaggeration, then, to view this data as identifying a public health emergency.

For one thing, the decline is a big one over a relatively short period.

Do you doubt it? Ask yourself this: What’s four years of living worth to you?

Further, the gap between the well-educated and the poorly educated is larger still. As reported by the Times, white women without a high school diploma have a life expectancy of 73.5 years, while those with college degrees have a life expectancy of 83.9 years.

So, then, what’s 10.4 years of living worth to you?

More to the point, how can this be?