Declining life expectancy

[meierlde]

The important point is that 85% of prescriptions are for generic medicines, whose developement was already paid for. Further consider the number of adds for lawyers to due drug companies over adverse reactions to their drugs. This is why IMHO generics are better independent of the costs, by the time the drug goes generic if there are any bad adverse reactions they will have shown up due to the larger population that has taken them.

[mpeirce]

Quote:

Originally Posted by 6miths Are we sure that the noted difference isn't the as weather is to climate. When pundits try to explain every movement of the stock market we tend to chuckle, is this different. There may be many reasons why a dip could occur but I'd like to see a few more years of data before I would be convinced that there was a real trend (even if there could be reasons for that too).

I agree a dip doesn't make a trend. It'll be interesting to see if this holds up over a few more years.

I've read a few articles on this and they mention a few death categories that are up: drug overdoses, car crashes, and suicides.

Also, you're always going to see shifts among the categories. As one type of death goes down, others go up. Old folks die of different things than youngsters or midsters.

You can't eliminate deaths. Best case you only postpone them some.

[braumeister]

Interesting web page showing death rates by county:

US Health Map | Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation