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In addition, Congress should pass a law that would at long last crack down on drunken drivers, who get away with long last crack down on drunken drivers, who get away with murder. Half of all fatal accidents involve drivers who have been drinking. The U.S. would be wise to emulate the Scandinavian countries. In Sweden, police routinely stop drivers and test suspected drinkers. Anyone with more than .05% alcohol in his blood (about one cocktail or two strong beers for a 165-lb. person) is sentenced to as much as six months in jail, usually at hard labor. That is more than many a U.S. drunken driver gets for causing a serious accident.
DO MUCH MORE TO SAVE THE LIVES OF NEWBORN CHILDREN. Infant mortality is higher in the U.S. than in 20 other nations and territories. Indeed, the U.S. rate is almost double that of Sweden or The Netherlands, where high-quality, state-supported medical services are easily available to all people, whether rich or poor, urban or rural. Last year 75,000 American infants died within one year of birth. A disproportionately large number of these were born to mothers who were young (under 20), poor and/or black. Either because of lack of education or lack of money, such women often get little or no prenatal or postnatal care. The infant mortality rate among American nonwhites—31 per 1,000 live births—is nearly twice as high as for whites.
Surely the nation's record would improve if Congress adopted a national health-care program, which has been proposed in varying forms by leaders as disparate as President Nixon and Senator Kennedy. Beyond that, a state-supported medical program would raise the nation's life expectancy by providing health care for millions who cannot now afford it.
These steps are only a beginning, but they would have immediate benefits. If the number of homicides in the U.S. were reduced by half, average life expectancy would rise by .1 year. If the overall rate of auto, industrial and other accidents were also cut in half, bringing it down to the lowest level now recorded in industrial countries, average life expectancy would rise by .65 year. If the infant mortality rate among nonwhites could be reduced to that of U.S. whites, life expectancy would rise by .15 year.
Taken together, these actions could quickly increase average longevity in the U.S. by about a year. More than that, they would add up to whole lifetimes for many of the young, who now die or are killed prematurely. Certainly the expansion of life is well within the reach of a people who like to think that they can accomplish anything they set out to do—and it is well worth setting as a national goal.
Marshall Loeb
* There is a great gap between races. U.S. life expectancy for white males is 68.1 years, for nonwhite males a distressingly low 60.5.