Last night on All In With Chris Hayes, Hayes had a segment on the decline in U.S. life expectancy. This graph was displayed. The green line is the U.S. and the light lines (all well above the U.S.) are the other OECD countries:
(As always, click the image to enlarge.)
The thrust of Hayes's coverage was about the big divergence in recent years, especially since Covid, and how the other countries' drops in life expectancy have begun to recover, while ours has continue go down.
Which, yes, of course, is the biggest takeaway from the graph.
But it's also apparent, if you look at the left side of the graph, that the U.S. used to be in the lower middle of the OECD life-expectancy pack back in the early 1980s, but just around the time the Reagan presidency ended, we dropped below all the other countries and they have since all continued to increase their life expectancies at noticeably greater rates than we have.
As with so many other things, the change began to happen under Reagan, and we have not recovered.
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