Step up the game: Expecting to live 78.1 years

Well reports are coming out...US life expectancy is at an all-time high, read all about it http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/11/AR2008061101570.html.

What will consumers do with this information? Well, reading through some of the commentary, I've actually seen comments that this shows that our health services industry gets a thumbs up, there is no health services crisis.

With thinking like this, I suppose these people will die before their alloted expectancy and be surprised. AVERAGE, means that we're including the high numbers of older Americans who are living to higher ages...guys, those Americans had employer-sponsored health services, heck some of them had a doctor make a house call for their colds and could still afford to feed their families afterwards. All of those Americans were eligible for Medicare and, I know you're not going to believe this, but some of them actually have been sick and survived because their medications and surgeries were covered by health insurance. Not true any more.

The impact on life expectancy of our new world of for endless profit medical services has yet to impact life expectancy because we still have those older Americans helping our average. We also still have employer sponsored health insurance AND we still have Medicare. But unless you live under a rock, you know that each year we whittle away at those options and each year we lose some of our current set of older Americans as new ones come in. It is when the current generation of older Americans who had health insurance and Medicare die out that we will see the impact of our new let 'em die approach to health services and health insurance and then, there will be a drop in life expectancy (of course, in my opinion).

This statistic shows only one thing: Citizens should be fighting for our country to commit to its citizen's health by retaining a system that WAS working as evidenced by the overall increase in longevity for our population.