(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
 . . . . . . . . . .



Native American Middle Age Death Rates Increasing [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2024-01-05  

Daily Kos regularly presents Native American articles but the thing that is missing is how middle aged Native American death rates have been the highest and increasing the most of any racial/ethnic group in the United States. I recently posted a write up showing that middle aged non-Hispanic white death rates have been increasing since 1999 www.dailykos.com/…

The largest failure of our health care system to do its job shows up the most in our middle age Native American death rates. In the above graph all the ages from 20 to 65 show an increased single year age death rate from 1999 to 2020. The two top dots show that for 33 and 39 year old Native Americans. (You probably think I am making this up. well the first time I had wonder.cdc.gov produce this data I thought “something is messed up here”. I ran the program to produce the data again and again and again and kept getting the same results, I then took the raw data and recalculated the death rates a couple of times. Again, I found the same thing.) The age 33 Native American death rate increased from 177 deaths per 100,000 For Native Americans from 1999 to 538.8 in 2020, that is increasing 361.0 points, the first COVID year. This last year of data increased 203.0% from 1999. For the 39 year olds the increase was from 235.2 to 719.0, 483.8 points, a 205.7% increase from 1999 to 2020. In over 30 years of working and playing with demographic data, I have never seen increases in death rates that are any where near as high as these. While these extreme increases in the middle aged Native American death rates are extremely high, they follow the same pattern as I found in non-Hispanic whites in the earlier post. It clearly looks like what hit the middle age white deaths badly, hit the middle aged Native American death rates much worse.

Here is some data on health care expenditures for Native Americans by the Indian Health Service:

Per Capita Personal Health Care Expenditures Comparison:

FY 2019 Indian Health Service expenditure per user population: $4,078 www.ihs.gov/… .

The 2021 same measure for the total United States population is: $12,914, www.healthsystemtracker.org/… .Now the difference between 2019 and 2021 added some to the total United States measure but I cannot find later data for the Native Americans. In general I think it is safe to say that the total population of the United States spends about three times as much for the health care of the non-Native American population as they do the the Native Americans served by the Indian Health Service.

Looking at the above graph shows that the change in the death rate for the young and the old have generally been declining. Because of age, the uninsured Native American young qualify for the health care access provided the uninsured young and Medicare is available for the elderly. Since the young, middle aged, and elderly are essentially the same in experiencing the things that threaten their lives, the differences in their health care access has to be the major reason their young and old have so much better changes in their death rates. In fact, the elderly Native Americans have a little lower death rate than our non-Hispanic whites. But in a unmeasured part that is due to the higher death rates among the middle aged keeps some less health Native Americans from living long enough to die in to oldest age group.

In the earlier positing about non-Hispanic white death rates I suggested Medicare for all would be a quick fix for the high death rate our middle aged non-Hispanic whites experienced, I also think the same change in our health care delivery system would quickly provide adequate health care for middle aged Native Americans. I find what is going on now among Native Americans as bad as the kinds of things that an internet search for: “the old reward for an Indian scalp” yields.

This all reminds me of when I was visiting my grandmother when she was on her death bed, she was clearly unhappy when she told me: “The Indian sure as hell shows up in you”.

Another background story: Once when I was visiting my grandmother during a summer when I was about ten or twelve, we were visited by an old friend of my Grandfather. As he talked to me one evening when we were alone he asked me if my Grandmother ever talked about my biological grandfather, I told him. that I have never hear her mention him. He then told me the following story:

In the past my Grandfather, who my last name Gundlach comes from, lived in Germany and a few years before WWI started he and a few other men were planning to kill the German Zahr, Their plan became known to the Zahr and he sent police to find and execute them. My grandfather escaped by hiding in the cargo of a ship that left Germany for some place unknown to him. The ship arrived in the United States and my Grandfather eventually moved to Oklahoma and married a Native American woman who owned a quarter section farm near Watonga. When WWI started they had three children, the youngest was my father who was born in 1912. My Grandfather left his family and went back to Germany to fight against the Zahr. The last word his friend had from my Grandfather was a letter sent from England saying he was headed to Germany to fight with the underground. Nobody has heard anything from or about him since.

A last sideline. I grew up on a farm in western Oklahoma. The deed for the land that made up that farm, 160 acres or a half mile square, showed that the white man we bought it from bought it for seven barrels of whisky from a Native American.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://dailykos.com/stories/2024/1/5/2215128/-Native-American-Middle-Age-Death-Rates-Increasing?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/