22 October 2010

Life expectancy after age 65

For all the gazillions of dollars spent on health care in the U.S., overall life expectancy is considerably lower than in other Western countries.  This discrepancy is often blamed on firearm and automobile deaths among younger people distorting the average life expectancy.

The graph above shows the gradually improving life expectancy of men aged 65 around the world.  Note that the U.S. (in red) is at the bottom of the group, and actually has been losing ground in the past couple decades.  Found at Yglesias, where there is also an almost identical graph for women at age 65.

5 comments:

  1. So it's NOT our fatness and anger-based culture? How fascinatingly horrible.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wow, I see Australia did not rate at all! Is this good or bad I wonder?!
    http://woodsrunnersdiary.blogspot.com/
    http://livinghistory.proforums.org/

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hmmm. I wonder if it might have anything to do with government-provided health care?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Umm.. do the numbers on the left indicate (average) additional years of life after age 65?

    ReplyDelete

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...