
America is the richest major nation, but it doesn’t have the longest life expectancy, because of Americans get obese at higher rates than most countries, and Americans get in auto accidents at higher rates (and kill each other at higher rates than people do in most developed countries).
Life expectancies are higher in East Asia and Western Europe than in the United States. As Our World in Data explains,
For most of the 20th century, Iceland, Norway, Australia, and Sweden competed for the top position before being overtaken by Japan in 1984. Hong Kong and Japan have held the records since then.
These countries didn’t merely catch up; they’ve continued to push the limits higher.
Japan added six more years to female life expectancy between 1984 and 2010, rising from 80 to 86 years.
This remarkable rise has resulted from many advances in medicine, public health, and living standards — breaking many predictions of the “limits” of life expectancy.
Hong Kong is the place with the longest lifespan (85.63 years). It’s not a country, but a separately-administered region of China.
The ten countries with the longest lifespans are Japan (8.4.85 years), South Korea (84.43 years), Switzerland (84.09 years), Australia (84.07 years), Italy (83.87 years), Singapore (83.86 years), Spain (83.80 years), Malta (83.47 years), Norway (83.46 years), and France (83.46 years).
Even nations much poorer than America — such as Albania, Panama, Slovenia, Greece, and Portugal — have longer life expectancies than the U.S.
U.S. life expectancy is less than 80 years, and life expectancy has not risen in the U.S. as much as it has elsewhere over the last 20 years. Indeed, life expectancy shrank in 2015, for the first time in many years. That was the first year after core provisions of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) went into effect. As ABC News warned in 2016, “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” due to 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.