The Mystery of California Deaths

Articles today in the Post and Times on a new study of trends in US death rates.

Much information, including this:


Note that while trends are terrible for the upper NE and eastern MW, California and Wyoming are going the other way with OR, NV, and NY not too bad. 

I'd like to know what's going on here, I skimmed quickly through the article and didn't pick up much.  Obesity and smoking are bad, recent immigrants and service industries are good. 

A guess--Asian and Hispanic immigrants might be particularly helpful.  But in the end it's a mystery.

Erroneous Payments and Wrongful Death

Post reports that SSA has erroneously recorded some people as dead when they aren't.  Seems to be part of a project to improve the accuracy of death records, where SSA continued to show people as living when they were indeed dead. 

(I've blogged on this several times before, but used a number of different labels for the posts.  Search on "erroneous" in the upper left search box to find them.)

Reducing Fraud, Waste and Abuse in Government

One of the ways Presidential candidates propose to finance their promises is through reducing fraud, waste and abuse.

GAO estimates $124.7 billion in improper payment in FY2014 in testimony here. 

The Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported that section 281 of the Department of Agriculture Reorganization Act of 1994 precluded the use of recovery auditing techniques>Specifically, the agency reported that section 281 provides that 90 days after the decision of a state, a county, or an area committee is final, no action may be taken to recover the amounts found to have been erroneously disbursed as a result of the decision, unless the participant had reason to believe that the decision was erroneous. This statute is commonly referred to as the Finality Rule, and according to USDA, it affects the Farm Service Agency’s ability to recover overpayments.

In 2013 GAO dinged NRCS and RMA for not checking SSA death files.  Situation hadn't changed by March 2015.

The bulk of the testimony points out problems relative to the SSA death files.

Seems to me Congress could fix many of the problems by changing the laws in several instances: permit SSA to pass on state-provided death data (eliminating the need for separate files), easing the ability to share the data with agencies, forcing state agencies to use the data (in the case of TANF)

Outwalking Death

This MSNBC article reports research which says if you can walk faster than 2 mph, you're probably in good enough shape to keep Death at bay.  The good news is I can easily walk faster than that.  The bad news, which the article doesn't cover, is that the Big Al (as in Alzheimers) walks faster than Death.

Cemeteries and Memorials

A couple random things from today's media--the Times has an article on the military leaving Camp Victory in Iraq.  Part of the process is dismantling the memorials erected to remember various deaths, one of which was going to be transported back to the states. Meanwhile Ann Althouse notes a Tampa Bay piece on memorials: apparently they already have 500 and are looking at more.

Also, when we come back from Herndon from our regular weekend visit to The Tortilla Factory, there's a wooden cross erected by the on-ramp to the Fairfax Parkway.  I assume it commemorates some teenager who lost control there and died in the accident.

Finally, there's the famous factoid about Reston: it has no cemeteries.

Discussion: in the old days when I was young, people would gather on Memorial Day at the cemetery to cleanup damage and remember the dead.  Commemorating death was a communal activity because the tombstones represented people were ancestors and relatives of the people living in the community.  As a little kid you'd go around and see the names on the big family stones: Thompson, Kittle, whatever, and be able to connect them to the farms and houses you saw along the roads.

Today we no longer have that community, that communal knowledge, and we likely no longer have that cemetery.  Hence the individualistic drive to commemorate a death, a tragedy, with something along the roadside.

My memories of course evoke a rural/small town atmosphere.  I'm sure in the big cities cemeteries were very different, particularly as regards class. But my memories were/are in stone; the inscriptions on the stones gradually fade and erode, but my great great grandmother's grave stone, who emigrated from Ireland and died in 1850, is still legible.  For better or worse, the more individualistic monuments of today don't have that enduring power.

Relying on SSA's Death Master File

This Project on Government Oversight post reports SSA's OIG finds significant problems in the Death Master File, so SSA continues to make payments to dead people.  This is important, because FSA and other government payers rely on hitting the Death Master File to check on payee eligibility. [Updated link] 

The Very Model of a Superior Social Security Bureaucrat

Via Volokh Conspiracy, a profile of the head of the Social Security Administration. The last lines quoted from his poem "Cancer Prayer" remind me of Walt Whitman's poem, Dressing the Wounds, which my wife and I heard put to music by John Adams at the Kennedy Center last night.  There is a time to welcome death.