•April 20, 2016•

By Trudy Lieberman,
Rural Health News Service

Those of us who grew up in small rural communities in the 1950s and 60s, expected to have longer life spans than our parents.

The trends were in our favor. White women born in 1900 could expect to live, on average, just shy of 49 years; white men 46.6 years. Those were our grandparents and our neighbors.

By 1950, life expectancy had climbed to 72 years for white women born that year and 66.5 for white men. By 2000, life expectancy was still increasing, with female babies expected to live to nearly 80 and males to almost 75. America was on the rise, jobs were plentiful, antibiotics kept us from dying of strep throat, and polio vaccine kept us out of the iron lung. We thought things would only keep getting better.

So I was dismayed to read a story in the Washington Post in April that blew holes in those childhood expectations. The Post found “white women have been dying prematurely at higher rates since the turn of this century, passing away in their 30s, 40s, and 50s in a slow-motion crisis driven by decaying health in small town-America.”

That “small town America” was where I grew up. I contrasted the Post’s findings to the claims made by all those politicians who have told us we have the best healthcare in the world and who point to gobs of money lavished on the National Institutes of Health to find new cures and to hospitals promoting their latest imaging machines. The Post found that since 2000, the health of all white women has declined, but the trend is most pronounced in rural areas. In 2000, for every 100,000 women in their late 40s living in rural areas, 228 died. Today it’s 296.     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.