Behind the NY Times Headlines on ‘Death in Middle Age’

A wide range of factors have contributed to results shown in the recent Harvard study, showing a significant increase in middle-age deaths in America. In effect, since President Bill Clinton left office, the American people have gone through 15 years of Hell, parallel to the Hell that Russia suffered during the 1990s’ “lost decade” under Boris Yeltsin. In demographic terms, the process in the US over the past 15 years has mirrored the destruction of Russia. Since 2001, health care costs have risen by 20-30 percent a year, even under Obamacare, and many Americans simply do not have full access to the healthcare system.

From 2001 on, the US has been engaged in permanent warfare in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now in Syria. The stress on families of soldiers who have served multiple tours in combat has been tremendous, with much of the impact hard to quantify, such as the effect on young children of being raised by one parent, with the constant financial pressures and concerns about combat injuries and deaths. The number of returning combat veterans with PTSD adds to the crisis.

Poverty has become a growing factor, with the poverty rate among young males in Washington, DC, growing by 5-12 percent per year. In New York City, 60 percent of the population is living at or below the poverty level, when real inflation of housing and other costs is taken into account.

Under the Fed’s zero interest rate policy, retirees and families attempting to save for retirement have been looted, through a loss of interest earnings. Alternatively they have been drawn into the stock market and other speculative investments, where they are vulnerable to outright theft by the vultures.

The Harvard study cited increasing middle-age deaths from drug and alcohol abuse, and this is truly reaching epidemic proportions. In July, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) published a study showing that heroin addiction in the United States has skyrocketed from 2011-2014, with the largest increases among women and non-Hispanic whites. Among families with an income of $50,000 or more, the rate of increase over that period was 60 percent. In Baltimore, which is known as the “Heroin Capital of the United States,” one in ten residents abuses heroin. The rise in middle-class heroin addiction was linked by the CDC study to the expanding use of prescription pain killers like OxyCondin. Increasingly, people addicted to pain killers are turning to heroin, which is one-fourth the price of the prescription drugs, and is now readily available in communities all over the country. The CDC study found that people using prescription pain killers are 40 times more likely to abuse heroin. Heroin addiction has gone up by 150 percent in the United States since 2007, aided by a massive influx of cheap and potent South American heroin, supplementing the Mexican and Asian heroin flows.

The same day that the New York Times reported on the Harvard study on middle-age death rates soaring, the Times also reported on an alarming rise in suicides, noting, from a May 2015 study published in JAMA [Journal of the American Medical Assoc.] Pediatrics that suicide rates in rural areas have gone up by 20 percent from 2004-2013 and by 7 percent in urban areas.