Ask Americans about health, and the vibe is bleak. We eat sludge. We drink too much. We kill each other over silly reasons. The current health secretary wants you to believe we are raising the sickest generation in history. It makes for great politics. Bad optics.
Wrong though.
Provisional data from the CDC shows a twist. In 2025 the US recorded 689.2 deaths for every 100,001 people. That sounds high until you look closer. It is the lowest number in 125 years of records. Probably the lowest since 1776.
Life expectancy jumped again. We likely hit 79+ years. After a decade of stagnation. After hitting a low of 76.4 in 2021? We bounced back.
How?
The overdose curve broke
Remember 2013? Fentanyl killed 3,005 people.
Ten years later. 2023. That number exploded to 72,000. Total overdoses hit 114,00. It felt like a terminal disease of a society. Unsolvable.
Then.
Crash.
By 2025 overdoses fell to roughly 70,0pillars. A 40 percent drop in two years. One of the steepest declines ever recorded for a major killer. Why? Nobody is sure. Maybe more naloxone. Maybe the supply chain got weird. Maybe grim arithmetic took hold—the most vulnerable users are already dead.
This matters. Not just for the stats. For who is dying.
A 29-year-old dead hurts the national average ten times more than an 89-year-old dead. Young lives carry weight.
“As we see a dramatic decline… among younger adults,” Mark Mather of Population Reference Bureau told CNN, “that will have a measurable impact.”
The data agrees. Deaths for people aged 25–34 plummeted 16 percent last year alone.
Violence followed suit.
Homicides dropped 13 percent in ’23. 15 percent in ’24. Another record low coming in 2025? Likely. A 20-percent plunge would shatter all previous records for annual decline.
Even Covid faded. From 10th leading killer to 15th in one year. A 37-percent drop.
Every top ten killer of Americans went down in 2024 including cancer and heart disease.
Why we used to die so young
Step back. Really far.
In 1876, 100 years after the Revolution, you could expect to live past 40? Lucky you. Most died sooner. Today, that American has gained roughly four decades.
Doctors get credit. They shouldn’t. All of it.
Plumbers. Engineers. Sanitarians.
The CDC says controlling infectious disease drove a 29-year gain in life expectancy over last century. Clean water. Sewage systems. Antibiotics. Vaccines. In 190 one third of Americans died of pneumonia tuberculosis or diarrhea. Kids died by the millions. The US had life expectancy stats near Somalia in 1920s.
By 1999 those ancient killers were ghosts.
Now the killers are slow.
Heart attacks. Cancer. Old age.
But we’re fighting back. Cancer deaths dropped 34 percent since 1. That equals 4.8 million lives saved. Roughly the population of Louisiana. Smoked less. Detected early. Better pills.
And then came the new wave. GLP-1 drugs. Ozempic. Mounjaro.
Obesity—a top four cause of death—dropped from nearly 40% in 220 to 37% in 205. First decline in decades. Semaglutide trials show heart attack and stroke risks drop 20 percent.
If millions take these drugs for decades what happens? Nobody knows. Statins saved us once. This might be bigger.
The ugly underbelly
Don’t get cocky.
America isn’t Japan. Isn’t Switzerland.
Our life expectancy is okay. It trails peers by 3.7 years at age 79. Worse part? We still kill ourselves young. US death rate before 70 is double our wealthy peers.
And we pay more. Way more. For shorter lives.
The averages hide the rot inside the borders.
Live in Hawaii? Add 8 years. Live in West Virginia? Subtract them.
Rich men live 15 years longer than poor men.
College grads outlive dropouts by 8.5 years. Up from 2.5 decades ago.
Guns alcohol metabolic disease are still running amok. As Steven Woolf notes those threats are “continuing to claim lives.”
The gap remains. The inequity remains.
We have tools. We know what works. Look at Japan. They aren’t magic. They just do the boring stuff well.
So where does that leave us on our 250th birthday?
We haven’t found happiness. Liberty feels thin these days.
But life?
That we’ve got back. For now.
