“According to the United Nations, the average global life expectancy in 2019 was 72.6 years. It dropped to 70.9 years during the pandemic before climbing to an all-time high of 73.3 years in 2024. The average real, which is to say inflation-adjusted, global gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in 2019 came to $10,946. That fell to $10,454 in 2020. In 2023, it stood at an all-time high of $11,579. The global absolute poverty rate, measured as the share of the world’s population living on less than $2.15 in purchasing power parity-adjusted 2017 dollars, stood at 8.8 percent in 2019 and climbed to 9.7 percent in 2020. The latest estimates from the World Bank put that rate at 8.5 percent in 2024 – an all-time low,” reports The Doomslayer.
Incomes are high in the U.S., but life expectancy has not risen in the U.S. the way it has elsewhere. 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 falsely 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. 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.” And that was even before the Biden administration used its control over student loans to write off billions of dollars in student loans at taxpayer expense.
