Wouldn’t this imply that the GDR had a much lower life expectancy, low enough that rolling it into Germany caused the average life expectancy to plunge? What am I missing here?
Abruptly ending the entire social safety net in the GDR and replacing it wholesale caused a lot of people to die, I imagine. I'm no expert on the topic, but it's well-documented that there was a massive spike in deaths in East Germany once the wall fell.
Naturally this was a major contributor, I'm just surprised it caused the entire country's LE to drop so fast and so dramatically, although this was par for the course in the eastern bloc countries undergoing shock therapy.
Apparently we still don't know exactly why, because the incoming Freedom and Democracy of the West™ thought it was a cool idea to rip out the entire medical coding system in GDR hospitals. So there's very little data on why life expectancy dropped even in the furthest west parts of the former eastern bloc.
Abruptly ending the entire social safety net in the GDR and replacing it wholesale caused a lot of people to die, I imagine. I'm no expert on the topic, but it's well-documented that there was a massive spike in deaths in East Germany once the wall fell.
Naturally this was a major contributor, I'm just surprised it caused the entire country's LE to drop so fast and so dramatically, although this was par for the course in the eastern bloc countries undergoing shock therapy.
Apparently we still don't know exactly why, because the incoming Freedom and Democracy of the West™ thought it was a cool idea to rip out the entire medical coding system in GDR hospitals. So there's very little data on why life expectancy dropped even in the furthest west parts of the former eastern bloc.