Re:The decline in U.S. life expectancy is unlike anything se...
by Arnt on Friday October 25, 2019 @03:57AM
(#21352800)
So I did a few back-of-the-envelope calculations. What magnitude do you have in mind? Because what I got was single-digit numbers of weeks, and why bother to discuss differences as small as that?
I started by assuming that since most health care cost is concentrated in the last four years of life, that's for how long retirees can affect the statistics by moving or not moving. 4 is a small number, and the number of people who move also cannot be large compared to the general population in the area they move from, so no matter how I tweaked it, I arrived at near-zero results.
The elderly on death's door in a nursing home are not moving to some retirement community in Florida where they can DUI a golf cart all day.
The young who are depressed or have substance abuse problems are not the people who have the spare willpower to relocate so they can run the rat race in a major metro.
So your calculations for any given year are going to favor places like NYC and Florida because their cohort includes all those "less likely to die this year" people who moved there last year. So a state or region could be doing everything wrong yet still have good life expectancy because it's where people with good life expectancy wind up.