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American Women Dying Younger Than Their Moms?

This is upsetting but important reading: American women are dying at younger ages than their mothers.

For some Americans, the reality is far worse than the national statistics suggest. In particular, growing health disadvantages have disproportionately impacted women over the past three decades, especially those without a high-school diploma or who live in the South or West. In March, a study published by the University of Wisconsin researchers David Kindig and Erika Cheng found that in nearly half of U.S. counties, female mortality rates actually increased between 1992 and 2006, compared to just 3 percent of counties that saw male mortality increase over the same period.

“I was shocked, actually,” Kindig said. “So we went back and did the numbers again, and it came back the same. It’s overwhelming.”

Kindig’s findings were echoed in a July report from University of Washington researcher Chris Murray, which found that inequality in women’s health outcomes steadily increased between 1985 and 2010, with female life expectancy stagnating or declining in 45 percent of U.S. counties. Taken together, the two studies underscore a disturbing trend: While advancements in medicine and technology have prolonged U.S. life expectancy and decreased premature deaths overall, women in parts of the country have been left behind, and in some cases, they are dying younger than they were a generation before. The worst part is no one knows why.

No one knows why.

Worse yet is this:

Other researchers have pointed out the correlation between education rates and declining female health outcomes. The most shocking study, published in August 2012 by the journal Health Affairs, found that life expectancy for white female high-school dropouts has fallen dramatically over the past 18 years. These women are now expected to die five years earlier than the generation before them—a radical decline that is virtually unheard of in the world of modern medicine. In fact, the only parallel is the spike in Russian male mortality after the fall of the Soviet Union, which has primarily been attributed to rising alcohol consumption and accidental death rates.

“It’s unprecedented in American history to see a drop in life expectancy of such magnitude over such a short time period,” said Jay Olshansky, the lead author of the study. “I don’t know why it happened so rapidly among this subgroup. Something is different for the lives of poor people today that is worse than it was before.”

It’s horrifying that this is the case in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, but yes, let’s shut down the government because poor women need pap smears.

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“Trolling for Good” & Trans Inclusive Healthcare

Dana Contreras was named in this cool article by The Advocate about “the 10 most innovative companies and the LGBTs who got them to the top” – basically, she’s a smart one. So smart that she gets a lot of recruiting emails from potential employers, so she’s decided to take this otherwise awkward outreach from them to ask an important question, namely, if they offer trans inclusive health insurance.

Why? Because “this is some heinous bullshit and you need to know about it.”

Most places don’t. Even liberal institutions that should know better don’t realize, or don’t care, that their health insurance suppliers actively exclude coverage of even the basics of healthcare. I’m not talking about genital surgeries, but just hormones prescriptions and labs, and therapy. That is, a trans person can go to a therapist for depression, if that’s covered, but they can’t go to a therapist to talk about being trans, a pending transition, or even to process the enormous changes that come with transition.

Contreras calls it bullshit and I’ll second her. That is, a woman of a certain age who might be on HRT because it’s recommended by her doctor will have these blood tests covered, but a trans woman – who is usually on much higher doses of estrogen – won’t. And that, friends, is discrimination: when the exact same perks are offered to one kind of person and not to another kind of person for no apparent reason, no difference in cost, no anything but ignorance and prejudice.

 

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Race & Gender & Life Expectancy

So this is shocking news: whites who don’t graduate high school have a life expectancy that’s four years shorter than it used to be. And look at this:

In 2010, American women fell to 41st place, down from 14th place in 1985, in the United Nations rankings. Among developed countries, American women sank from the middle of the pack in 1970 to last place in 2010, according to the Human Mortality Database.

Uneducated white women are now living not even as long as black women with the same lack of education. That is honestly shocking. The life expectancy of uneducated black women has always been horrible, but now even more women are dying at the same rates.

But then there’s this guy:

“There’s this enormous issue of why,” said David Cutler, an economics professor at Harvard who was an author of a 2008 paper that found modest declines in life expectancy for less educated white women from 1981 to 2000. “It’s very puzzling and we don’t have a great explanation.”

Um, what? Bad health care, single parenting with little to no safety net (which can cause more stress), substance abuse (especially of prescription drugs and cigarettes), sexual violence… is this really hard to work out?

The one good part, I suppose, is that the percentage of everyone without high school diplomas is down from 22% to 12%.

So much for feminism being redundant in America, eh?

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Mammogram Covered

I’m happy to report that Aetna is now covering Beth Scott’s mammogram, but honestly, does it have to be like this?

Ms. Scott underwent the mammogram in June 2010 at her doctor’s recommendation. Aetna denied coverage for the mammogram on the grounds that it fell under her policy’s exclusion for treatments “related to changing sex.” As a transgender woman, Ms. Scott was assigned male at birth and developed breasts after undergoing hormone therapy. Aetna refused to alter its position throughout the lengthy appeals process.

Aside from the fact that men get breasts and develop breast cancer, I am so tired of hearing about insurance companies getting in the way of care that a doctor ordered. Still, congrats to TLDEF and to Ms. Scott.