Unless, of course, they agree with me, in which case they are simply wise academics trying to share their wisdom with the unwashed masses. :)
There is a logical problem here, and it's much deeper than life expectancy. It's a problem with this form of argument. The problem is that, if you use statistics to make political arguments, you're going to be arguing forever. Whatever this guy wants to do -- and god bless him I hope he gets his way -- next year the same guy will be using statistics to tell us to do something else. That's because you can slice statistics in an almost infinite amount of ways, and I can guarantee you that one of those ways will show some kind of imbalance or injustice that needs addressing.
That's all fine and dandy if the entire country could turn on a dime. I wish it could but it can't. Not reality. Instead we live in a system where it takes decades to make even one change, and it's extremely rare to stop doing things that don't work -- we just do more new stuff. I hate to rag on the IRS, but take a look at the tax code. It's so bad that I'm willing to wager nobody alive knows how to file taxes exactly correct.
This puts us in an infinite cycle of where we're always measuring things with statistics, finding some social cause worth pursuing, painfully making changes, then making more measurements. Each time through the loop the system gets more and more unwieldy and complex. It's a feedback loop that increases government dysfunction.
So instead of arguing about one cause or another, I'd like to suggest a rule for such discussions: if you want to make a case for some kind of social policy change, then make it in terms of a trade-off from whatever the existing status quo is. I realize there are a lot of problems with this suggestion, but at least it starts putting things in terms of trade-offs instead of wish-lists. Just from looking around, it seems to me that the real world is a lot more about trade-offs and compromises than moral crusades and justice. But that's just me. The only thing that I am observing is that this pattern can be repeated indefinitely, and each time through the loop conditions will continue to deteriorate. It's reactive leadership by statistics, and that almost never works.