Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Thursday, November 26, 2009

Income, Health and Life Expectancy

By John Ballard



Crof tweets a link to a Canadian study validating a usually ignored common sense conclusion.
The study and numbers may be Canadian, but there is no reason to imagine similar results anywhere in the world.



Only 51.2 per cent of Canadian men in the lowest income group (the bottom 10 per cent) can expect to live to age 75. By comparison, 74.6 per cent of high-income earners (the top 10 per cent) can expect to see 75.

That is a startling 23.4-point difference � not good odds.





For women, the comparative figures are 69.4 per cent of poor women living to 75, compared with 84.4 per cent of wealthy women. A smaller, but still significant, 15-point gap.



Put another way, at age 25 a poor man can expect to live an additional 48.6 years. A wealthy man can expect 56 years � a 7.4-year gap.

A poor 25-year-old woman can be expected to live 56.5 more years, compared with 61 years for a wealthy woman of the same age. That gap is 4.5 years.

Those are the raw numbers based on conventional life expectancy.



When Statistics Canada applied the HALE measure, it found that those gaps between poor and rich were even more considerable.

Being wealthy translated into 11.4 more years of healthy living for men and 9.7 for women.

When they crunched the numbers further, the statisticians found that even if you compare the health-adjusted life expectancy of the highest-income earners with those of the average person, the difference was still 5.9 years for men and 4.2 years for women.



To put those numbers in context, consider that cancer, the No. 1 killer in Canada, reduces health-adjusted life expectancy by 2.8 years for men and 2.5 years for women.



There are a lot of numbers to digest here, but the bottom line is this: People's income (or lack thereof) has about twice the impact on their health as cancer does.

That is a humbling bit of data.

It also raises the question: Why is tackling poverty not a health priority?





I'll not insult the reader by further comments.

These little factoids are to be filed until the next time someone again tries to argue the greatness of our health cafe system.

Yeah, I know. That just illustrates how poor the Canadian system is. Wanna dig around to see if ours is better in that respect?
Better not go there. 



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