Working Age Americans Dying at Higher Rates

Pandora Dewan in an article in Newsweek notes that the mortality rate of working age Americans is higher than those in other high-income countries:

Over the past three decades, most high-income countries have seen a significant decline in midlife mortality between the ages of 25 to 64. However, according to researchers at Oxford and Princeton Universities, mortality declines in the U.S. for this age bracket have been significantly slower than in other countries, and have even reversed in recent years.

Using data from the World Health Organization Mortality Database between 1990 and 2019, the team concluded that by 2019, all-cause midlife mortality rates in the U.S. were 2.5 times higher than the average rates in other high-income countries. The study, which was published in the International Journal of Epidemiology on March 21, did not evaluate data during the years of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the life expectancy gap between the U.S. and other high-income countries widened even further.

I wish the author had provided some conjectures on why that might be. The United States is different from other high-income countries in innumerable ways. I’m sure that some will rush to conclude that the difference is the availability of insurance but health care insurance has been widely available in one form or another for a decade or more and that is not evident in the mortality statistics.

The original study is here. It appears to me that a considerable amount of the differences are due to high and rising suicide rates and deaths due to alcoholism and other substance-related deaths.