from Hacker News

Life expectancy in the U.S. varies greatly by region

by binarynate on 4/3/23, 1:32 AM with 92 comments

• by rgmerk on 4/3/23, 2:33 AM

  Nobody has explicitly connected the other damning life expectancy visualisation on Twitter yet, so it’s worth linking to it:

  https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799627128143873?...

  The difference in life expectancy between the UK and the US is mostly down to young Americans dying from guns, drugs, and cars; my guess is much of the differences within the US are attributable to the same factors.

• by dfxm12 on 4/3/23, 1:55 AM

  I saw all the doom and gloom tweets, but didn't realize most of the cause boils down to policy decisions. Call your elected officials and tell them you don't want to die an avoidable early death.

• by pg_bot on 4/3/23, 3:01 AM

  One thing that also should be pointed out is the race gap in medical outcomes. When you look at the statistics Black Americans face a higher risk of stroke, heart attacks, cancer mortality, infant mortality, maternal mortality, HIV/AIDS, diabetes, pneumonia, etc. In almost every leading cause of mortality in the United States there is a significant gap between Native Americans and Black Americans and the rest of the population.

  My sense is that there is a combination of culture and poverty that is causing this gap to occur. Poverty doesn't seem to be the sole cause IMO (although it's probably the biggest factor) because white people and asian people experience similar levels of poverty but asians live way longer.

• by trynumber9 on 4/3/23, 2:21 AM

  Correlation with obesity rate seems stronger than anything else.

  And alcoholism in certain counties.

• by sremani on 4/3/23, 2:23 AM

  Rio Grande Valley (one of poor regions in US) has similar life expectancy as Northern Burbs of DFW while beating Dallas and Tarrant county. Need to take a deeper look at the data.

  Could be access to medical facilities in Mexico border towns - that would be some fascinating data.

  Looks like the data is pulled from here - https://ghdx.healthdata.org/about-ghdx/ghdx-records-explaine...

• by scottLobster on 4/3/23, 2:05 AM

  Wow. I knew of course that there was a spread to the average, but I never imagined there were such large swaths of the country that never even make it to full retirement age.

• by brightball on 4/3/23, 1:57 AM

  “Every man dies. Not every man truly experiences sweet tea.” - Southern Braveheart (probably)

• by nine_zeros on 4/3/23, 2:01 AM

  One thing that was stark and unbelievable to me is that the sheer number of medical providers in New England, Western and Upper midwestern states are so much higher than the south.

  If one were to live in rural America, rural coasts are so much better than rural south, from a medical perspective.

• by zoklet-enjoyer on 4/3/23, 2:38 AM

  Pretty messed up you can see where the reservations are.

  Scroll down and compare the maps https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_reservation

• by fooker on 4/3/23, 2:59 AM

  For those who are immediately thinking of the political angle, compare Utah and Oregon.

• by thrdbndndn on 4/3/23, 3:01 AM

  I'm surprised this shitty visualization made it here out of all places.

  The colorbar is "clearly" picked to make things more dramatic: the "middle" isn't centered (red part is longer), each end has a sizable chunk that basically has the same dark color.

  Also isn't the dominant factors simply poverty? One of course can go further and discuss why these regions are poorer (which IMO is history), but the direct cause of low life expectancy variation in the US is pretty clear to me to be poverty than secondary things like life choices and/or policies.

  OTOH, the fact the US as a whole is significantly lower than many other developed countries is something more interesting.

• by UncleOxidant on 4/3/23, 2:47 AM

  Interesting choice of Blue and Red there.

• by jerojero on 4/3/23, 3:17 AM

  It's really depressing that, given the good data that we have available and the different compared experienced from other countries and public policy research efforts from our academics that the political system is simply incapable of producing the right policies to remedy these situations.

  I mean, it seems to me like there's so much that gets confused in the public debate that most people voting for their representative have actually no idea what they're actually voting for. The political stage is filled with so much misinformation (which includes lies and omissions) that it has become very difficult for people to make the little decision power they have a good decision.

  In many ways, I think the political system encourage a sort of "package deal" policy making. When in reality people will have positions all over the political spectrum. And most importantly, I think people are not even given the opportunity to change their minds to begin with. Misinformation and lack of opportunity to deliberate is really hurting the policies that are being adopted by most states and this is very concerning.

  Of course, we shouldn't expect people to be concerned about everything at all times and be completely immersed in every issue out there. But there are plenty of ideas out there that seek to find middle of the ground solutions between engagement and influence. It just feels really bad that people are so concerned about closing the holes made by the faulty system that they don't stop and wonder that maybe a lot of these holes are natural consequences of the system's design to begin with.