Robert VerBruggen explains at National Review Online why the latest data on America’s death rate should cause concern.
Americans are dying more. Not just poor white Americans — that we already knew — but Americans as a whole, according to preliminary data for 2015 that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released yesterday. That hasn’t happened since 2005, and the numbers are adjusted for age, so the difference can’t be chalked up to an older population.
It’s not time to panic yet. This is just one year of preliminary data — just two or three quarters for some causes of death — and the overall death rate rose less than 1 percent, from 723.2 to 729.5 per 100,000. But lurking in the numbers are some highly troubling early patterns, particularly when it comes to Alzheimer’s, homicides, and drug overdoses.
One way to approach the data is to look at the major players: The rate rose by 6.3 per 100,000; where did that come from? By far, the biggest shifts were for Alzheimer’s and cancer. Alzheimer’s deaths rose by 3.8 per 100,000 — more than half of the total rise in the death rate, and an unusually abrupt jump for the disease, which rose steeply in the early 2000s but then leveled off. It’s not clear why Alzheimer’s deaths rose even after adjusting for age, and it doesn’t help that they are significantly undercounted on the death certificates the CDC relies upon. But cancer nearly cancelled it out, falling by a respectable 3 per 100,000.
Beyond that, what’s amazing is how widespread the increases are. The CDC released data for 20 causes of death — though a few overlap, like homicides, suicides, and gun deaths — and the trend was positive for almost all of them. Besides cancer, HIV also fell, and the pneumonia/flu category was flat. But heart disease, falls, accidents, Parkinson’s, stroke, suicide, liver disease, the list goes on: Those all rose, if only slightly.
The data also contain warning signs about causes of death that are too rare to significantly affect the overall rate. For example, the homicide rate was 5.1 per 100,000 in 2014, so it couldn’t realistically change by 3 per 100,000, as did cancer (which started at 160.9 per 100,000). Nonetheless, homicide is important: It’s an indicator of societal health, it affects young people more than most other causes of death, and it is increasing meaningfully. …
… Then there are drug overdoses, which slowly spiraled out of control for more than a decade before the mainstream media took notice, and which are concentrated in areas with large populations of poor whites. It doesn’t look like 2015 will be the year that ODs finally level off. The new data end with the second quarter, but for the year concluding then, the rate was 15.2. Rewind to the year ending with the second quarter of 2014, and the number was 14.1.
