Being rich and having access to the very best health care probably improves your longevity more than “bad” lifestyle factors hurt your longevity. I would guess that they are slightly less likely to die than the median white collar worker, but since the mortality rates at those ages are only 1% to 2% they practically can’t be much lower. Like an actuarially significant adjustment factor might be to say that a well off group’s mortality rates might be 10% lower then the general population. But 10% of 1.5% is not a lot.
This is just sickening
What’s the point of working for the man if the man never pays out?
Not new news but still
The late Justice Antonin Scalia left a long legacy on the Supreme Court, from his devotion to originalism to his sharp-tongued rhetoric.
But the enthusiastic hunter and fisherman also set a precedent of sorts on how to take free trips without disclosing them — one that is now causing headaches for some justices.
In 2004, Scalia flew with then-Vice President Dick Cheney for a duck hunting trip at a private camp in Louisiana. A few weeks before, the Supreme Court had voted to hear the vice president’s appeal of a ruling that required the disclosure of energy industry lobbyists who had met with his energy policy task force.
When news of the trip was revealed, Scalia said his stay at the hunting camp involved personal hospitality unrelated to his court work.
And he said he need not step aside from ruling in Cheney’s case.
“I do not think my impartiality could reasonably be questioned,” he said at the time. He later joined a 7-2 ruling that shielded Cheney from disclosing the participants in his energy task force.
It also makes the “originalism is just me being an umpire calling balls and strikes” a great cover. If you’re just mathematically determining what the originalists intended them it doesn’t matter how the parties smooze you, you’re just here to peer into the past.
So you can feel a sense of belonging when the man bullies people less powerful than you.
I think it’s really fucking weird how much these dudes apparently love going on these trips. You’re a grown ass man, how is it in any way enjoyable to go on a trip where the theme is undoubtedly how awesome your host is? I would legitimately rather take my kids to a national park and sleep in a motel 6 then go on one of these trips for free.
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Trump also looks unhealthy AF and there is no end in sight.
I don’t know about that. Once you’re eligible for Medicare, the care that you can get may not be “the very best” but I think it is close enough for a lot of things.
I’d take a healthy weight, 80-year-old non-smoker who lives with 10 min of the Mayo Clinic over an obese, smoking 80-year-old Trump-type in a last longer bet. Assuming both are cancer-free at the start.
High blood pressure is the silent killer. No warning.
I’m just going to start hanging around the downtown airport and ask if they have any empty seats available.
Really they should pay you to take the seat.
You can probably come up with all kinds of combinations that go either way. These questions are complex, and my profession continues to try to come up with as much research as possible to understand trends on an aggregate level. It’s actually very interesting stuff, probably the most interesting part of being an actuary IMO.
Anyway, you’re right that if you specifically pick a healthy person with good access to health care vs. an obese smoker, OK fine the obese smoker is fighting an uphill battle. But at the population level what you find is that usually access to heath care in Freedom Number 1 USA depends a lot on affluence. And over time the impact of things like smoking → cancer → death is decreasing for richer people because the ability of the medical industry to detect cancers and treat them has increased a ton over the past couple of decades. At the same time, access to those detection and treatment resources is increasingly dependent on affluence. If you want to guess how long an X-year old person will live and you could only pick a single factor to guide that decision, I’m pretty sure the best data point you could pick is the person’s postal code because it contains so much rich information about socio economic status.
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This is a real deep cut but do you guys have access to this report?
Every year the Canadian Institute of Actuaries (we call ourselves “the CIA is that is NOT the evil one”) publishes reports where we try to identify key longevity trends for pricing insurance for Canadians. This last report came out just last week. There is some of what I’m talking about in here, you can see on page 19 of the report that smoker status is weirdly inconclusive - the people in this data set are people that bought life insurance, and there’s no clear evidence that mortality experience varies all that much between smoker and non-smoker. On the other hand, on slide 21 and 22 the rates of death absolutely plummet as the size of the life insurance contract increases. Since size of insurance coverage trends closely with overall affluence, this can be read as a trend in mortality vs. wealth. And this is in the SOCIALISM health care system we have in Canada.
Anyway, just some food for thought. One study one one subset of one group of Canadians isn’t the be all and end all, but it’s pretty darned instructive and I think it’s a pattern that pops up a lot.
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I didn’t realize that the Culinary Institute of America was so nefarious.
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Wasn’t Scalia literally on one of those free hunting junkets when he croaked?
We burned their HQ to the ground in the War of 1812. And we’d do it again if given half a chance.
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This is an excellent point. All these trips sound like pure torture. They must really love fellating each other.
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What super secret cancer detection does Trump have that your typical boomer Medicare beneficiary doesn’t have access to?
If it’s has proven benefit, then the random boomer can get it for approx free. If it has no proven benefit, then Trump having it should make no difference.
The one weird trick here is Medicare. Once you’re an old, you basically have access to pretty good UHC. Just got to make it to there first with whatever health care you can get. That’s where the affluence really helps.
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If you have to ask.