Dec 14, 2016 4 min read

One-tenth of a year. That’s a little over 36 days. It might not seem like much, but when it represents a decline in Americans’ average life expectancy, it’s a significant figure.

The National Center for Health Statistics reported recently that the average American can now expect to live to the age of 78.8 years, based on 2015 figures. That’s a decline from 78.9 years in 2014, and it’s the first such drop since 1993.

The factors are many, and varied, but in large part, the setback can be blamed on increased fatalities from heart disease, stroke, diabetes, drug overdoses and accidents, according to a Washington Post story on the report.

Said Princeton economist Anne Case, “I think we should be very concerned. This is singular. This doesn’t happen.”

But it did, and Case believes there’s a need for increased research of the rise in deaths from heart disease, the nation’s No. 1 killer.

Case and another Princeton economist, Angus Deaton, have researched the unexpected increase in death rates among middle-aged Americans, and the effect of what they call “diseases of despair” – overdoses, alcoholism and suicide. We have seen all too clearly the effects of the opioid epidemic in our local communities, and we are not alone.

David Weir, who directs health and retirement research at the University of Michigan, noted that improvements in death rates in a variety of areas were among the smallest in the past 40 years. “There’s this just across-the-board (phenomenon) of not doing very well in the United States,” he told the Post.

The National Center for Health Statistics report also found that the overall death rate in the United States rose by 1.2 percent last year, the first time that has gone up since 1999. Of the 2.7 million people who died, nearly half were felled by heart disease or cancer.

“We’re seeing the ramifications of the increase in obesity,” Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the newspaper. “And we’re seeing that in an increase in heart disease.”

A number of health experts told the Post that the increases in mortality are not being seen in other Western nations, a compelling reason to delve into what unique factors in our health, health care and socioeconomic structure are playing into these numbers.

“Mortality rates in middle age have totally flatlined in the U.S. for people in their 30s and 40s and 50s, or have been increasing,” Case told the Post. “What we really need to do is find out why we have stopped making progress against heart disease. And I don’t have the answer to that.”

One answer that is clear to us is that Americans need to do a better job watching out for their own health. We need to improve our diets. We need to exercise more. We need to work with our doctors to address risk factors and get the tests we require to keep potentially deadly conditions at bay, or to treat them.

We also feel certain that, if incoming President Trump and Republicans in Congress get their way, the problems that are being reflected in the mortality figures could get worse before they get better. Dismantling the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, without a carefully thought-out and effective plan to replace it will only exacerbate our situation, as would the scrapping of Medicare as we know it and replacing it with a voucher program, which will lead to worse, less affordable care for our senior citizens.

We are a wealthy nation. We have found plenty of money when it was needed to wage war and kill foreign people. It is our hope that more money can be set aside to improve health care for the American people.