Life expectancy will rise by 5 years in the world as a whole, but not the U.S., by 2050

Life expectancy will rise by 5 years in the world as a whole, but not the U.S., by 2050
Exhausted Italian doctors and nurses during the coronavirus pandemic

“The Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD) 2021, published in The Lancet, forecast that global life expectancy will increase by 4.9 years in males and 4.2 years in females between 2022 and 2050,” reports Medical Xpress:

Increases are expected to be largest in countries where life expectancy is lower, contributing to a convergence of increased life expectancy across geographies. The trend is largely driven by … improved survival rates from cardiovascular diseases, COVID-19, and a range of communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases….Global life expectancy is forecast to increase from 73.6 years of age in 2022 to 78.1 years of age in 2050 (a 4.5-year increase). Global healthy life expectancy (HALE)—the average number of years a person can expect to live in good health—will increase from 64.8 years in 2022 to 67.4 years in 2050 (a 2.6-year increase).

In most of the world, life expectancy has risen over the last decade, unlike the United States, where people have shorter lives than they had ten years ago. U.S. life expectancy is now 77.5 years, compared to 78.84 years back in 2014, when the core elements of Obamacare went into effect.

Americans’ health declined even as the provisions of Obama’s healthcare law — the Affordable Care Act — were supposed to have been helping. Life expectancy shrank in 2015, for the first time in many years. As ABC News warned then, “A decades-long trend of rising life expectancy in the U.S. could be ending: It declined last year and it is no better than it was four years ago.”

The Economic Policy Journal predicted in 2012 that “life expectancy will decline under Obamacare.” In 2009, the dean of Harvard Medical School, Jeffrey Flier, said Obamacare would cost lives by harming life-saving medical innovation. In 2013, two physicians wrote in The Wall Street Journal that Obamacare is “bad for your health,” and would hamper medical innovation by driving down investment in medical devices.

Architects of Obamacare predicted it would save lives by expanding Medicaid. But despite its large cost of billions of dollars annually, expanding Medicaid does little to improve health outcomes for recipients. As Bloomberg News’ Megan McArdle noted, an expansion of Medicaid eligibility in Oregon had “no impact on objective measures of health” for recipients. As a study in the New England Journal of Medicine pointed out, “Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first 2 years,” even though “it did increase use of health care services.”

Obamacare’s architects claimed it would not increase the budget deficit, despite its huge cost, because the healthcare law contained provisions largely nationalizing the student loan industry, to grab more revenue for the government. But the Biden administration used its control over student loans to write off $519 billion in student loans, at taxpayer expense, in Biden’s August 2022 student loan forgiveness plan. That $519 billion was to be added to the budget deficit, causing America’s national debt to skyrocket. Biden also made changes to the income-driven repayment program that could increase the cost of his student-loan plan to over $1 trillion. The Supreme Court blocked Biden’s original attempt to write off over $500 billion in student loans, finding he lacked the authority to issue blanket forgiveness of student loans. But after it did so, Biden came up with alternative plans to forgive hundreds of billions in loans. Court challenges have been brought against some of them, but so far he has forgiven $167 billion in student loans after being rebuffed by the Supreme Court. And is not clear who is deemed to have legal standing to challenge Biden’s student loan bailouts, even if they are illegal, so at least one challenge has been dismissed without reaching the issue of whether Biden acted illegally.

Recently, Biden bragged “about defying the Supreme Court on his unilateral student loan debt bailout: ‘When the Supreme Court told me I couldn’t, I found two other ways to do it.'” This was in a speech at Morehouse College, at which Biden made false claims about police killings of black men in demagogic and inflammatory remarks. (A study by the black Harvard economics professor Roland Fryer found that racism is not a significant factor in police shootings. At the time of Biden’s speech, only three unarmed blacks had been killed by police in 2024, two of which were justified killings — one was a man who used his car as a battering ram & grabbed a cop’s gun after attempting to attack his girlfriend, the other involved a convicted sex offender who “disarmed” a cop in an attempted escape attempt, and stole the van with another inmate still inside. The third killing was a tragic accident in which a police bullet killed not just a man trying to kill a black child, but also the black child the police were trying to save. Black men are not being slaughtered in the streets by cops or white people. Blacks do not bear the  brunt of interracial violence: In 2023, the number of whites killed by blacks was six times as high as the number of blacks killed by whites.)

Biden also has a separate plan to increase costs to taxpayers by $500 billion or more through changes to the income-driven repayment program. That plan will further increase the skyrocketing budget deficit, which recently rose from $2 trillion from less than $1 trillion, partly due to Joe Biden’s policies.

Obamacare backers falsely claimed that by “nationalizing the student lending industry…Obamacare would raise $58 billion in revenue over a decade,” notes the Washington Examiner. But it didn’t. Student loans had become a money-loser for the federal government, even before Biden forgave billions of dollars in student loans at taxpayer expense, magnifying the loss. As Ben Johnson of the Acton Institute notes, a “Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released in July [2022] found the Department of Education predicted that student loans would generate $114 billion for the federal government; they instead lost $197 billion — a $311 billion error, mostly due to incorrect analysis.”

Although lifespans in the U.S. will rise less than in the rest of the world by 2050, new lifesaving technologies will increase lifespans somewhat in the U.S. as well.

Scientists have developed tiny robots made of human cells to repair damaged cells. Nanorobots are also being used to fight cancer: “In a major advancement in nanomedicine, Arizona State University scientists…have successfully programmed nanorobots to shrink tumors by cutting off their blood supply.”

The world’s first blood test for brain cancer may raise survival rates by detecting it earlier. A child recently was cured of a type of brain cancer that previously always killed kids who had it. A recently developed cancer vaccine for dogs doubles their survival rate. Similar vaccines could be developed for humans in the future.

Scientists recently came up with an “inverse vaccine” that has shown it can treat auto-immune diseases in a lab setting, so doctors might be able to use it to reverse multiple sclerosis. But the FDA can take many years to approve life-saving drugs and medical devices, so recent medical innovations may be in common use for many years, delaying their life-saving potential.

Hans Bader

Hans Bader

Hans Bader practices law in Washington, D.C. After studying economics and history at the University of Virginia and law at Harvard, he practiced civil-rights, international-trade, and constitutional law. He also once worked in the Education Department. Hans writes for CNSNews.com and has appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal.” Contact him at hfb138@yahoo.com

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