So what in this country couldn't be significantly improved if we had free universal health coverage and childcare? Bombing Syria, maybe, but that's the other thread.
Universal childcare would allow mothers of young children to play an equal part in the bombing.
So its not that poor women have worse health problems, its that "didn't graduate high school" designates an even poorer group of women than it used to? That makes sense.
Or maybe that's a history effect? I keep forgetting stuff from graduate school.
Yes, when further looking into this I found the point in 3 as a published response to the Health Affairs article in question.
Good thing I read 3. Here I was all set to agree to a plea deal and admit that I was the one killing poor white women, but that "cohort effect" thing would be more than enough to establish reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury.
I wonder if anyone's looking at the effect of the toxins in our water (because of so many of these women being in the Ozark mountain area). The miscarriages make me think of that especially.
But that wouldn't explain them all being white women. Although black women in Arkansas live mainly in the Delta, so maybe?
But there are Hmong and Asian women up here in the mountains, and Latinos. If it was the water, we'd see effects there too. Also surely it would be effecting the men as well.
Maybe not then.
Thanks for posting this. I had been thinking about mentioning the article but couldn't think of anything to say other than, "depressing, but worth reading, and the sort of journalism that makes me appreciate the American Prospect."
10.3: Not necessarily on men vs women (think endocrine disruptors - the miscarriages would make sense), but you're quite right about equal effects across race. It would be interesting (and depressing) to see soil and air quality analysis in lots of places across the US. Unfortunately, the lab results for longterm chemical exposure at low levels are really not indicative in any meaningful way of what happens in humans.
Point already well made in 3-4. You are not comparing apples and apples here, HS dropouts are a totally different group today than a couple of decades ago. Especially post expansion of the GED. You are selecting out a smaller and more disadvantaged portion of the population.
So I don't know what to make of this. Per some quick googling, life expectancy of *all* white women increased by 1.3 years over 2000-2010, twice as fast as it increased in the previous decade. Would like to see life expectancy broken out by income percentiles, e.g. life expectancy for women with below median income. Then at least you're dealing with the same fraction of the population. Increased income inequality might be mirrored in greater inequality of life expectancy. But it's hard to get income longitudinally over the life course -- there are some surveys that could do it though.
This table is interesting. Most striking thing 2000-2010 is big increase in life expectancy for blacks, absolutely and relative to whites. Maybe not depressing enough to make a headline but curious what is driving it or if it's real.
Maybe not depressing enough to make a headline
Depressing enough?
I was thinking, especially, because poorer women don't tend to have water filters on their tap water, which almost all middle class & up here in the Ozarks do.
Though who knows really how effective those are.
Poorly managed diabetes would explain the miscarriages as well as the early deaths.
Also, type 2 diabetes can go undetected forever or until you collapse if you're not seeing a doctor regularly, and even then. I know a couple of people who've been told they probably would have been classified as having it for the best part of a decade before they presented. If you're in poor health otherwise, the shit will hit the fan.
If you eat a fruititarian diet, you'll have so much more shit to hit the fan.
Killjoys. I was about to come in here and say "Cohort effect!" but people already beat me to it. It was the first thought I had. I mean, a five year fall is statistically pretty huge, isn't it? It strikes me as something needing a demographic explanation or an overwhelming (and thus presumably identifiable) cultural or medical trend, rather than it being that nebulously and inconclusively that much more difficult to be a poor white woman.
Notwithstanding 3, it seems to me like zeroing in on untreated diabetes and reproductive health problems makes a lot of sense. Anecdatally, my friend's half-sister had a horrifying experience with rural health care for poor women a couple of years ago: She was unwantedly pregnant, addicted to meth, and had serious complications with the pregnancy. But because of the monstrous anti-reproductive freedom laws in her upper midwestern state, she couldn't get an abortion, and so had to carry to term the fetus, which I believe was born alive, but severely messed up, and then fell into a coma. I'm not sure whether she ultimately survived the ordeal or not. Her doctors could have aborted early and saved her health, but they refused to tell her that was an option.
Depressing.
When people in China assume that the poorest American must be better off than an average Chinese person, because we're such a wealthy and developed country, I think about stories like this. But since I don't know how to say, "single wide trailer" in Chinese, I don't elaborate and simply respond that "American poor people are also truly poor, and their lives are very difficult."
Translation Party disappoints on that one.
"Golden Palace who work through labor glory"