The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered possible explanations, including a spike in prescription drug overdoses among young whites, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, rising obesity, and a steady increase in the number of the least educated Americans who lack health insurance.
White men lacking a high school diploma lost three years of life. Life expectancy for both blacks and Hispanics of the same education level rose, the data showed. But blacks over all do not live as long as whites, while Hispanics live longer than both whites and blacks.
Some researchers say that the results may be overstated because there are actually fewer whites without high school diplomas today, down from 12 to 22 percent in 1990. The researcher, Professor Olshansky does not refute this but says:
the magnitude of the drop in life expectancy was still a measure of deterioration. “The good news is that there are fewer people in this group,” he said. “The bad news is that those who are in it are dying more quickly.”
I wonder about the Hispanic subgroup and suspect is this were further analyzed by generational status or length of recency in this country if we would see U.S.-born Latinos/Mexicans as similar to poor whites or blacks since cultural assimilation, among other things, also means assimilating to behaviors that can compromise their health. A number of researchers, including UCLA's David Hayes Bautista has documented this in the area of health. Falls under what today is referred to as "the Latino Paradox" which is not really so much a paradox but reflective of the diverse generational/acculturational composition of the Latino population.
Finally, this argues for the merits of universally accessible health care and higher educational opportunities that the middle- and upper-classes, particularly whites, have enjoyed to a much greater extent if we are to improve the health of our nation.
-Angela
Life Expectancy Shrinks for Less-Educated Whites in U.S.
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
For generations of Americans, it was a given that children would live
longer than their parents. But there is now mounting evidence that this
enduring trend has reversed itself for the country’s least-educated
whites, an increasingly troubled group whose life expectancy has fallen
by four years since 1990.
Researchers have long documented that the most educated Americans were
making the biggest gains in life expectancy, but now they say mortality
data show that life spans for some of the least educated Americans are
actually contracting. Four studies in recent years identified modest
declines, but a new one that looks separately at Americans lacking a
high school diploma found disturbingly sharp drops in life expectancy
for whites in this group. Experts not involved in the new research said
its findings were persuasive.
The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered
possible explanations, including a spike in prescription drug overdoses
among young whites, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, rising obesity, and a steady increase in the number of the least educated Americans who lack health insurance.
The steepest declines were for white women without a high school
diploma, who lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008, said S. Jay
Olshansky, a public health professor at the University of Illinois at
Chicago and the lead investigator on the study, published last month
in Health Affairs. By 2008, life expectancy for black women without a
high school diploma had surpassed that of white women of the same
education level, the study found.
White men lacking a high school diploma lost three years of life. Life
expectancy for both blacks and Hispanics of the same education level
rose, the data showed. But blacks over all do not live as long as
whites, while Hispanics live longer than both whites and blacks.
“We’re used to looking at groups and complaining that their mortality
rates haven’t improved fast enough, but to actually go backward is
deeply troubling,” said John G. Haaga, head of the Population and Social
Processes Branch of the National Institute on Aging, who was not
involved in the new study.
The five-year decline for white women rivals the catastrophic seven-year
drop for Russian men in the years after the collapse of the Soviet
Union, said Michael Marmot, director of the Institute of Health Equity
in London.
The decline among the least educated non-Hispanic whites, who make up a
shrinking share of the population, widened an already troubling gap. The
latest estimate shows life expectancy for white women without a high
school diploma was 73.5 years, compared with 83.9 years for white women
with a college degree or more. For white men, the gap was even bigger:
67.5 years for the least educated white men compared with 80.4 for those
with a college degree or better.
The dropping life expectancies have helped weigh down the United States
in international life expectancy rankings, particularly for women. In
2010, American women fell to 41st place, down from 14th place in 1985,
in the United Nations rankings. Among developed countries, American
women sank from the middle of the pack in 1970 to last place in 2010,
according to the Human Mortality Database.
The slump is so vexing that it became the subject of an inquiry by the
National Academy of Sciences, which published a report on it last year.
“There’s this enormous issue of why,” said David Cutler, an economics
professor at Harvard who was an author of a 2008 paper that found modest
declines in life expectancy for less educated white women from 1981 to
2000. “It’s very puzzling and we don’t have a great explanation.”
And it is yet another sign of distress in one of the country’s most
vulnerable groups during a period when major social changes are
transforming life for less educated whites. Childbirth outside marriage
has soared, increasing pressures on women who are more likely to be
single parents. Those who do marry tend to choose mates with similar
education levels, concentrating the disadvantage.
Inklings of this decline have been accumulating since 2008. Professor
Cutler’s paper, published in Health Affairs, found a decline in life
expectancy of about a year for less educated white women from 1990 to
2000. Three other studies, by Ahmedin Jemal, a researcher at the
American Cancer Society; Jennifer Karas Montez, a Robert Wood Johnson
Foundation Health and Society Scholar at Harvard; and Richard Miech, a
professor at the University of Colorado Denver, found increases in
mortality rates (the ratio of deaths to a population) for the least
educated Americans.
Professor Olshansky’s study, financed by the MacArthur Foundation
Research Network on an Aging Society, found by far the biggest decline
in life expectancy for the least educated non-Hispanic whites, in large
part because he isolated those without a high school diploma, a group
usually combined with high school graduates. Non-Hispanic whites
currently make up 63 percent of the population of the United States.
Researchers said they were baffled by the magnitude of the drop. Some
cautioned that the results could be overstated because Americans without
a high school diploma — about 12 percent of the population, down from
about 22 percent in 1990, according to the Census Bureau — were a
shrinking group that was now more likely to be disadvantaged in ways
besides education, compared with past generations.
Professor Olshansky agreed that the group was now smaller, but said the
magnitude of the drop in life expectancy was still a measure of
deterioration. “The good news is that there are fewer people in this
group,” he said. “The bad news is that those who are in it are dying
more quickly.”
Researchers, including some involved in the earlier studies that found
more modest declines in life expectancy, said that Professor Olshansky’s
methodology was sound and that the findings reinforced evidence of a
troubling pattern that has emerged for those at the bottom of the
education ladder, particularly white women.
“Something is going on in the lives of disadvantaged white women that is
leading to some really alarming trends in life expectancy,” said Ms.
Montez of Harvard.
Researchers offered theories for the drop in life expectancy, but cautioned that none could fully explain it.
James Jackson, director of the Institute of Social Research at the
University of Michigan and an author of the new study, said white women
with low levels of education may exhibit more risky behavior than that
of previous generations.
Overdoses from prescription drugs have spiked since 1990,
disproportionately affecting whites, particularly women. Professor
Miech, of the University of Colorado, noted the rise in a 2011 paper in
the American Sociological Review, arguing that it was among the biggest
changes for whites in recent decades and that it appeared to have offset
gains for less educated people in the rate of heart attacks.
Ms. Montez, who studies women’s health, said that smoking was a big part
of declines in life expectancy for less educated women. Smoking rates
have increased among women without a high school diploma, both white and
black, she said. But for men of the same education level, they have
declined.
This group also has less access to health care than before. The share of
working-age adults with less than a high school diploma who did not
have health insurance rose to 43 percent in 2006, up from 35 percent in
1993, according to Mr. Jemal at the American Cancer Society. Just 10
percent of those with a college degree were uninsured last year, the
Census Bureau reported.
The shift should be seen against the backdrop of sweeping changes in the
American economy and in women’s lives, said Lisa Berkman, director of
the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. The
overwhelming majority of women now work, while fertility has remained
higher than in European countries. For women in low-wage jobs, which are
often less flexible, this could take a toll on health, a topic
that Professor Berkman has a grant from the National Institute on Aging
to study.
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