America is a declining country.

23 December 2024, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

By virtually all measures, the U.S. has been declining ever since around 1975-1980, but certainly since 1980. For example, the National Academies (of Science) 2010 book International Differences in Mortality at Older Ages says in its summary “Discussion” at the end of Chapter 12:

DISCUSSION

To summarize our main results, every population in our study experienced gains in e50 [life-expectancy at age 50] from 1980 to 2000 at a pace of at least half a year per de-

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cade. In general, improvements in longevity during this period benefited men more than women, so that the gender gap has been progressively closing. The United States has made smaller progress than all the other populations with, for women, a gain of 1.1 years between 1980 and 2000 compared with 2.1 years in Canada, 3.2 in Western Europe, 3.4 in France, 4.3 in Germany, and 4.9 in Japan, and for men, a gain of 3.0 years compared with 3.5 years in Canada, 3.6 in Western Europe, 3.7 in France, 4.8 in Germany, and 3.1 in Japan. A substantial drop in the U.S. position in international rankings of e50 reflects this relatively slow improvement.

Our analysis has demonstrated that the slower progress achieved by the United States is partially due to its increasing regional variability compared with other high-income countries. Indeed, whereas internal disparities in the United States, whether measured at the state or at the county level, tended to decline up to the early 1980s, they have increased since then, in contrast to most other populations in the study (with the notable exception of women in Western Europe taken as a whole), which have experienced stability or an ongoing decline of geographic variability. For men, the difference of trends in regional disparities explains up to 50 percent of the relatively slower pace of increase in e50 for the United States compared with three of the four countries examined here (as noted earlier, this comparison is not meaningful in the case of Japan, since the pace of change in male e50 was nearly the same as in the United States over this time period). For women, however, rather little (under 10 percent in the most relevant cases) of the slow progress recorded by the United States in e50 compared with other countries can be attributed to differential trends in regional disparities. Indeed, the difference between the United States and the other countries in the number of years of life gained after age 50 over the last 20 years of the 20th century was not much different when comparing only the better-off 50 percent of each population than when comparing the worse-off 50 percent.

Thus, although the relatively less favorable trend in life expectancy at age 50 for the United States was due in part to increasing geographic disparities in the country during 1980-2000, combined with a general reduction of such disparities in the other countries examined, most of the slower pace of improvement [in America] must be attributed to policies, practices, and behaviors that are characteristic of the nation as a whole. This conclusion is consistent with the findings by Banks and colleagues (Banks et al., 2006), who showed that, even within similar income strata, the English are in much better health than their U.S. counterparts with regard to seven key health indicators (diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, myocardial infarctions, strokes, diseases of the lung, and cancer). These researchers also found that the gradient of mortality differentials by socioeconomic status (measured by years of education and household income) is substantial in both countries but steeper in the United States. They noted that neither individual behaviors, such as smok-

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ing, alcohol consumption or diet, nor access to medical care, measured by whether respondents had health insurance, explained much of the difference between the two countries.

In conclusion, we think that this analysis helps to rule out an increase in geographic disparities as a dominant explanation for the deteriorating position of the United States in international rankings of life expectancy, especially for women. Any proposed explanation of the divergence in levels and trends of life expectancy observed among high-income countries in recent decades needs to acknowledge that even the most advantaged areas of the United States (at the state or county level) have been falling behind in international comparisons.

Anyone who says that for some Americans — the super-rich, for example — relocating abroad to another high-per-capita-GDP country will probably not improve their health and life-expectancy, is either ignorant or a liar, because the data are extensive and show otherwise: even the rich in America live shorter than the average person does in other high-per-capita-GDP countries. And if you’re NOT rich in America, then you’ll likely go to an early grave if you don’t leave the country.

HERE is how much of an outlier — an extreme exception — the U.S. is on longevity. (See it there. It is shocking.) The world’s by-far costliest healthcare system is the world’s worst among the industrialized countries (and, of course, this is including in “healthcare system” everything that affects a nation’s life-expectancy, not merely its hospitals etc.).

The way that America’s news-media (propaganda-media) have been trying to soften the impression on this matter to the public is by insinuating that only the poor or only the uninsured or only the Blacks or … are suffering from America’s failures on health care. For example, on 21 November 2024, CBS News headlined “Life expectancy gap in U.S. widens to 20 years due to ‘truly alarming’ health disparities, researchers say” and linked to an article in Britain’s medical journal The Lancet, which was headlined “Ten Americas: a systematic analysis of life expectancy disparities in the USA”, which promoted the myth by concluding (all of which is true but misses the basic point of America’s gross and increasing failure for its entire population):

One’s life expectancy varies dramatically depending on where one lives [in the U.S.], the economic conditions in that location, and one’s racial and ethnic identity. This gulf was large at the beginning of the century, only grew larger over the first two decades, and was dramatically exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. These results underscore the vital need to reduce the massive inequity in longevity in the USA, as well as the benefits of detailed analyses of the interacting drivers of health disparities to fully understand the nature of the problem. Such analyses make targeted action possible — local planning and national prioritisation and resource allocation — to address the root causes of poor health for those most disadvantaged so that all Americans can live long, healthy lives, regardless of where they live and their race, ethnicity, or income.

Reducing America’s huge and increasing inequalities is extremely important but won’t do much if anything to mitigate America’s failure in its health care. The entire economy is corrupt, and ESPECIALLY so in its ‘Defense’ and health-care (including nutrition, hospital chains, insurance, pharmaceuticals, etc.) sectors — which have long been the most profitable sectors of the stock market, the ones that have the highest long-term returns-on-investment. What’s terrific for investors is lousy for the public, but the entire American system is based upon HIDING that fact FROM the public. The U.S. thus has the most-privatized, least-socialistic, health-care system of all the economically advanced countries. In order to address this problem, the entire healthcare system would have to be controlled no longer by private interests (the billionaires, who profit from, and are served by, America’s sicknesss industries), but instead at the level of and by the federal Government — like universalizing Medicare to ALL CITIZENS and expanding the services that it provides, while leaving to the private sector ONLY things that do NOT benefit the society more than they will add costs to society. (If those services are to add costs to the society, it should be adding those costs ONLY to the richest, NOT to the public.) The profit motive must no longer control America’s health-care (or control America’s ‘Defense’ industries), because it is toxic to the public, on such matters as these. And this also means that the revolving door between Government agencies and the industries that they ‘regulate’ must be outlawed so that no one who is employed on one side of that will ever be allowed to derive income from the opposite side of it. Regulators must represent the law, no entity that might profit from finding ways around the law. Government by corruption must be publicly acknowledged to be traitorous, and punished accordingly — not rewarded as in America.

On certain sectors of the economy (especially on the military, and on health-care), capitalism is plain toxic. All of the propaganda to the contrary is benefiting only the malefactors — at the public’s expense.

America’s life-expectancy peaked in 2014. Even then, it was just about the lowest of all high-income countries — and virtually all of the others have increased their life-expectancies since 2014.

America is declining. It’s not declining fast, but it has been declining for many decades. Increasing corruption is never the pathway toward a nation’s prosperity. It is the pathway toward a nation’s decline.

PS: If you like this article, please email it to all your friends or otherwise let others know about it. None of the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media will likely publish it (nor link to it, since doing that might also hurt them with Google or etc.). I am not asking for money, but I am asking my readers to spread my articles far and wide, because I specialize in documenting what the Deep State is constantly hiding — what the ‘news’-media ignore if they can, and deny if they must. This is, in fact, today’s samizdat.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.