U.S. Life Expectancy Falls Further
I can think of a few other causes like sickness being a potentially bankrupting event so people don&#x27;t go to a doctor when they should or too late.<p>This apparently is a risk, even if you have insurance because you are at the mercy of insurers not tossing you out over such whimsical reasons as pre-existing conditions or other bureaucratic tricks they use to kill their customers rather than getting them cured.<p>There are also these mafia extortion schemes that are completely legal where you have to pay through your nose for insurance in exchange for the privilege of not being charged tens of thousands of dollars for completely routine stuff like broken bones or other things that can and will go wrong for most people at some point. This is not a thing in most modern countries other than the US. Even many third world countries tend to get organized on this front to the best of their abilities.<p>Then there is the widespread obesity because of corn syrup being a heavily subsidized food ingredient (got to help those poor republican voting farmers). Also it seems there is a whole legislative game around shameless advertising on products where products that contain obscene amounts of corn syrup are advertised as &quot;fat free&quot; instead of &quot;don eat this you stupid fat F<i></i>*&quot;.<p>The reason for the drug overdoses is decades of shameless attempts by big pharma to coerce the US government on not cracking down on their quite successful attempts at selling heroine disguised as pain medication roughly at the same time when the war on drugs was a big thing. This too is much less of a thing outside of the US where pain medication tends to be very strictly regulated and not advertised every 10 minutes on TV.<p>In short, the above is the result of decades of misguided policies, failures to regulate, and greedy companies getting away with stuff they shouldn&#x27;t get away with and lobbying successfully to get away with ever more.