Hispanic Women Outlive Hispanic Men by More Than 7 years: 82.4 v 75.3
Men live sicker and die younger than women, leaving wives, daughters, sons, and sisters behind. And, the Health and Human Services (HHS) found that more than half the elderly women living in poverty were not in poverty before their husbands died.
There are several Offices of Women’s Health in the federal government, but there isn’t a corresponding Office of Men’s Health. Why not?
There are five Offices on Women’s Health at the federal level: at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMSHA). The combined annual budgets of these Offices is in the tens of millions of dollars. In addition, the Office of Research for Women’s Health within the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—one of several research agencies focusing exclusively on women’s health—has a large annual budget.
Unfortunately, there are still exactly zero Offices of Men’s Health anywhere in the federal government, zero offices researching men’s health, and a corresponding combined budget of exactly zero dollars. (In 2010, the Indian Health Care Improvement Act authorized the creation of an Office of Indian Men’s Health, but more than a decade later, that Office is still unstaffed and unfunded.)
Why not?—The answer to that is a bit more complicated and more tragic. In just the past few years, we’ve seen the gap between men’s and women’s life expectancy increase (it’s now more than five and a half years shorter than women’s), and a disproportionate number of men dying from COVID and “diseases of despair”—men make up more than two thirds of opiate overdose deaths and three quarters of suicides, according
