No Longer So Inactive, Teenage Gamblers, Etc.

Counterintuitive Datum of the Week: Americans are less apt to be physically inactive than they were a decade ago. A report from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports on a survey in which adults were asked, "During the past month, other than your regular job, did you participate in any physical activities or exercise, such as running, calisthenics, golf, gardening, or walking for exercise?" In 1994, 27.9 percent of men and 31.5 percent of women answered "no." The figures have fallen steadily since then. In 2004, 21.4 percent of men and 25.9 percent of women confessed to having engaged in no leisure-time physical activity. This trend is especially impressive when you consider that it has occurred even as the American population has been aging—which, other things being equal, would be expected to boost the incidence of inactivity. (The no-activity figure was over 30 percent for Americans age 70 and older.) But the greatest improvement came among some of the older population groups. Among men age 50-59, the inactive proportion fell from 33.5 percent in 1994 to 23.5 percent last year; among women age 60-69, it declined from 37.8 percent to 28.5 percent. In the Internet's old days, veteran users of the technology made more use of it than the newcomers did. Nowadays, says a report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, the key distinction is between online Americans who have a fast broadband connection and those who don't. The chart at lower left gives a picture of how home broadband users (who now constitute 53 percent of all home Internet users) differ from their counterparts who have a more poky connection. Meanwhile, the proportion of adults who've never used the Internet or e-mail and don't live in a wired household has held quite steady in recent years, and now stands at 22 percent. When the hard-core unwired were asked to cite the main reason why they don't use the Internet or e-mail, the top answers were "I'm just not interested" (32 percent) and "I don't have access" (31 percent). Much smaller numbers said "It's too difficult/frustrating" (6 percent), "It's too expensive" (5 percent), "I'm too busy/ just don't have the time" (4 percent) or "I think it's a waste of time" (3 percent).Afraid your teenagers are off someplace having sex, doing drugs or drinking beer? Relax: They're probably just gambling. A new study by the Annenberg Public Policy Center finds about 2.9 million Americans age 14-22 gamble on cards in an average week. Eighty percent of these gamblers are male. Among high schoolers, 14 percent of the boys gamble on cards in an average week, and 37 percent do so in an average month. Among high school girls, just 1.6 percent are weekly card gamblers, but 9.9 percent engage in this vice in a typical month.You might expect the new prescription-drug program to bring a surge in sales of such remedies when it's added to Medicare at the start of 2006. But that isn't going to happen, if current public attitudes are any indication. A GfK Market Measures study found widespread confusion about the program among current Medicare recipients. "As a result, interest in participating is limited, particularly among affluent seniors who are satisfied with their current coverage and see little incentive for moving to a new system." This dovetails with the findings of a CNN/ USA Today/Gallup survey of Americans age 65-plus. Just 12 percent of its respondents claimed to understand the new program "very well," with another 24 percent saying they understand it "somewhat well." In all, 22 percent said they plan on signing up. Even in lower-income households (i.e., those least likely to have private coverage for prescription drugs), relatively few said they plan to join the new Medicare program—31 percent of those with income under $20,000, and 21 percent of those in the $20,000-30,000 bracket.

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No Longer So Inactive, Teenage Gamblers, Etc.

Mark Dolliver

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