Top Five (well, 6) 2024 Mortality with Meep Posts: Life Expectancy, Cuomo, Cancer, and Murder!

There was a tie, so you get an extra!

Continuing the countdown posts for the end of the year. I have a tie for this one, so I will be sharing 6 instead of 5 posts.

Remember that you can read Mortality with Meep posts solely, if you want to skip the podcasts and the public pensions/finance/random posts.

Mortality with Meep page link: https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/s/mortality-with-meep

5. (tie) Longer Term Mortality Trend in the U.S.: Period Life Expectancy by Sex, 1900-2021

In this post, I captured the long-term mortality trends in the U.S. by age.

This used Social Security data, going back to the year 1900. I will likely be dipping back to this data set next year, in considering potential fixes to Social Security or other retirement-related systems.

5. (tie) Cuomo, Covid, and the Nursing Homes: Congressional Findings

There was a follow-up post, Cuomo, Covid, and the Nursing Homes: Part 2, What Was Cuomo's Own Involvement in the Cover-Up?, which ranked #7 among the posts.

My husband Stuart died soon after that second one, so I stopped on that series in 2024. I may return to writing on this if the Cuomo brothers try to get back into Democratic Party politics, whether on the New York or national level.

4. Notable Cancer Deaths: Cancer is the Top Cause of Death in Middle Age

Cancer was top-of-mind this year, and not only due to my husband’s death due to advanced prostate cancer. There were many high-profile cancer-related announcements as well as high-profile cancer deaths in 2024, especially deaths of younger adults. Cancer is the top cause of death for adults in middle age in the U.S., and I showed some of the recent and long-term trends for cancer in this post.

3. An Actual Murderer Among the Recently Commuted by Biden

This one is a strange entry for Mortality with Meep, as murder doesn’t come up often in my posts… especially murder for life insurance proceeds.

This was a life sentence for federal sentence for life insurance fraud commuted, as part of a blanket commutation of supposedly non-violent offenders.

Whups.

2. U.S. Mortality 2023-2024: Continuing Increased Mortality post-Pandemic

So many of my mortality posts are me waiting around for updated data. I’m still waiting for the 2023 finalized data to get into WONDER (and by “still”, I mean they recently finalized the data, and it’s here: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data_access/vitalstatsonline.htm#Mortality_Multiple — but I’m lazy, and prefer to grab the data through WONDER via my preferred queries. I can wait a week or two for them to upload.)

1. On the Low Life Expectancy of the U.S. Compared to Healthcare Expenditure

Speaking of murder….

So, this is complicated, but I can see why this late-breaking post was the top Mortality with Meep post by views.

Let me jump over some of the nasties that cause large life expectancy gaps with other nations (drug overdoses, homicide, suicide, and motor vehicle accidents) and get to the end of the post:

The red line shows the age-adjusted death rate in the U.S., 2000-2019, due to natural causes of death. So all those nasties I mentioned above are excluded.

The grey lines are other OECD nations.

The mass of the better-developed OECD countries (mainly European) have lower death rates than the U.S., and have continuing mortality improvement through 2019 (the end of this graph).

The U.S. stalled post-2012.

What is going on?

Yes, I know people will want to blame Obamacare, or something-something-Trump, or whatever their preferred hobby horse they want to ride.

But this is something slow-moving and long-term.

It is likely related to the increasing obesity of the U.S. population, as well as the concomitant diabetes and other metabolic problems. Americans were far less likely to die from screenable cancers than comparable countries, but much more likely to die from heart disease.

There will definitely be more on this in 2025.

Thanks for reading!