In a significant portion of the United States, life expectancy is falling:

Women in large swaths of the U.S. are dying younger than they were a generation ago, reversing nearly a century of progress in public health and underscoring the rising toll of smoking and record obesity.

Nationwide, life expectancy for American men and women has risen over the last two decades, and some U.S. communities still boast life expectancies as long as any in the world, according to newly released data. But over the last decade, the nation has experienced a widening gap between the most and least healthy places to live. In some parts of the United States, men and women are dying younger on average than their counterparts in nations such as Syria, Panama and Vietnam.

Overall, the United States is falling further behind other industrialized nations, many of which have also made greater strides in cutting child mortality and reducing preventable deaths.

In 737 U.S. counties out of more than 3,000, life expectancies for women declined between 1997 and 2007. For life expectancy to decline in a developed nation is rare. Setbacks on this scale have not been seen in the U.S. since the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918, according to demographers.

You can find the original article here.

There are some idiots out there who will suggest that it’s because we are too fat^*, but the deltas in life expectancy have primarily been through eliminating infant and child mortality, as well as pregnancy related medical issues.

What is going on here is that our medical system is breaking down.

We are undergoing the same collapse of our medical system, albeit more slowly, that occurred towards the end of the USSR, and there was not an outbreak of obesity there.

We have aging and under maintained infrastructure, we are wasting our resources on endless wars and a bloated defense establishment, and we are descending into a morass of corruption and self dealing with no prospect of it being fixed (see Geithner, Tim).

It sounds an awful lot like the declining days of the USSR.

^*He says that the same thing happened when we went from hunter-gatherer to farmer, but it misses little facts like:

• The average hunter gatherer works about 20 hours a week, the farmer works 60+ hours.
• The diet of a hunter gatherer is measurably better than that of a bronze or early Iron age farmer, because staple crops are typically less nutritionally complete.
• Agriculture requires that people move next to bodies of water, and live there full time, exposing them to things like Malaria, etc.

What really happened is that people could no longer be hunter gatherers because there was not enough land. You need something like 5 square km/year to support a single hunter gatherer, and once population crosses that threshold you move to herding, and eventually to farming, because the alternative is starvation.
life expectancies falling