For more than a century, life expectancy in this country rose steadily. Then something happened, and Biden needs to talk about it tonight, chrislhayes writes.
of drug overdoses in 2021 alone. Overdose numbers have been trending in the wrong direction for years now, hitting certain sections of the country particularly hard.
So if we put all this together, we find that one of the richest countries in the world is losing ground in the most precious, irreplaceable resource that exists: the lives we have on this planet. It bears repeating: Something is profoundly wrong. It is the job of leaders in our government to identify those problems and fix them.So if I were advising President Joe Biden on his State of the Union address on Tuesday, I would tell him to talk about extending life in America.
Because the declines are, as with all things in American life, unequally distributed. Life expectancy for Black Americans dropped by nearly four years. The first year of the pandemic alone took three years off Black Americans’ projected lifespans. And for Indigenous people, life expectancy dropped by almost seven years. It is a devastating cut to the life expectancy of a group already projected to live shorter lives than other Americans.
We live in one of the richest societies that humans on the planet have ever produced. We should be living long, healthy lives in America. Too many of us are not, and it is long past time for our government to act.at 8 p.m. ET Monday through Friday on MSNBC. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation.
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