“It has been claimed (Ohsfeldt and Schneider, 2006) that adjusting for the higher death rate from accident or injury in the United States over 1980-99 than the OECD average would increase US life expectancy at birth from 18th out of 29 OECD countries to the highest. In fact, what the panel regression estimated by these authors shows is that predicted life expectancy at birth based on US GDP per capita and OECD average death rates from these causes is the highest in the OECD. The adjustment for the gap in injury death rates between the United States and the OECD average alone only increases life expectancy at birth marginally, from 19th among 29 countries on average over 1980-1999 to 17th. Hence, the high ranking of adjusted life expectancy at birth mainly reflects high US GDP per capita, not the effects of unusually high death rates from accident of injury. For information, the most recent data (which were used to make these calculations) on average standardised death rates per 100 000 population from accident or injury over 1980-1999 for land transport, uicides, homicides, and falls, respectively are 17.4, 11.4, 9.2, and 4.6 for the United States and 15.5, 13.3, 3.0, and 10.4 for the OECD average (OECD Health Data, 2008). Life expectancy at birth on average over 1980-1999 was 75.3 years for both the United States and the OECD average (29 countries) (OECD Health Data, 2008).”
Further Ohsfeldt and Schneider has never been formally published or peer reviewed.
This is untrue. Ohsfeldt and Schneider did not 'remove fatal injuries from life expectancy data', they used a regression analysis to adjust life expectancy values to equalise the number of fatal injuries. They have not actually dug deep to actually investigate whether fatal injuries does explain low life expectancies, only observed that there is a correlation.
This methodology is questionable, to say the least, and can potentially produce perverse results, and to my knowledge, they have not shown their working to show that they have not fallen into the many many pitfalls this method can generate.
Further Ohsfeldt and Schneider has never been formally published or peer reviewed.