Americans are having fewer babies, but the declining birth rate is old news. The relative number of babies born in the United States has fallen for the past four years, now hitting a 32-year low and signaling that we’re in trouble: Without more immigration, we won’t be able to replace our population.
But there’s a more concerning demographic trend, and it’s happening at the other end of the hospital: Americans are dying sooner.
Relative to U.S. economic and social stability, it’s remarkable that the average age of death isn’t going up. Instead, the most recent data, from 2017, shows that American life expectancy has dropped over the past few years.
“Between 1959 and 2016, U.S. life expectancy increased from 69.9 years to 78.9 years but declined for three consecutive years after 2014,” a recently published report from the Journal of the American Medical Association explains. Culprits include suicide, organ system diseases, and drug overdose.
Not every area of the country has been affected equally. The report found that the “largest relative increases in midlife mortality rates occurred in New England (New Hampshire, 23.3%; Maine, 20.7%; Vermont, 19.9%) and the Ohio Valley (West Virginia, 23.0%; Ohio, 21.6%; Indiana, 14.8%; Kentucky, 14.7%).”
Those areas include what Medpage Today calls “hot spots” for the opioid epidemic, “where opioid mortality rates are both high and rapidly increasing.”
As mental health problems grow among teenagers and young people are committing suicide at higher rates, data on the well-being of Americans is looking increasingly bleak, but not if Americans begin to respond.
Christopher Murray, the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, told the Atlantic that the new mortality rate marks “a profound change.”
“This,” he said, “should really be getting everyone’s attention in a major way.”
