Texas already ranks last in the nation for mental health care, child health care, and women’s health. And that’s not all — our state also has the most people who are uninsured, and now (are we surprised?) it’s among the worst states for life expectancy.
The CDC says (at birth, in 2021), Texans can expect to live on average 75.4 years, compared to the rest of the United States, which gets one whole extra year. Axios Dallas reports that we’re, at the very least, not alone. (Some of our neighboring states aren’t doing so well, either.) States in the Northeast and West are out-living us. Also of note, women are also expected to live longer than men pretty much across the board.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention blame Texas’s outlier status on a combination of COVID-19 and drug overdoses. That’s consistent with data from the Texas Department of State Health Services, which showed that the top ten leading causes of death among Texans as recently as 2020 were a mix of chronic liver disease, diabetes, chronic lower respiratory disease, cerebrovascular diseases, and then the really good stuff: Alzheimer’s, accidents, COVID-19, cancer, and heart disease.
That means overdoses have boomed dramatically over the past five years: drug poisoning deaths increased more than 75% in just five years. In 2021, the drug poisoning death rate was 15.8 deaths per 100,000 residents, almost double the 2017 rate. In this area, death rates for men are more than twice as high as for women.
And of course, there’s the unprecedented heat, which is still reliably responsible for the death of Texans each year. In 2023, more than 300 people died from heat-related causes, the most since tracking began 35 years ago. Last week, Abilene broke a 139-year heat record; meteorologists at KTAB reported that temperatures reached 113 degrees for the first time since the National Weather Service started keeping records in 1885. That’s especially bad news for Abilene’s two prisons that only have partial air conditioning; oh and by the way, most Texas prisons have none at all.
So as Texas continues to rank high on the list for most people moving here, maybe ask yourself if it’s worth losing a year of your life? At least we rank in the top ten for funnest states in the country — and Austin is number one nationwide for night life, according to Time Out. YOLO right??
