WilliamLayton,
It's almost comical too. I checked the death rate of the Minnesota town I live in and it is improbably low, more like impossibly low. I checked some towns in Florida and the rates are improbably high, as in guaranteed death. Essentially what's happening is that people raise their kids here and work, and then they realize that without kids they don't need a good school system, and being retired they don't need good employers, so they consider the weather and the tax climate, and they leave. And they go to Florida, Texas, or Arizona.
My old barber, before he fully retired, lived near Brownsville Tx part of the year and everyone-- everyone!!!-- in the trailer park was from Minnesota.
The IRS publishes an interactive map that shows where people move from and move to. It's fun to play with it and see the movement southward out of Minnesota. Quite a few move to Colorado too.
So one reason for the high death rate is Florida is that people go there to spend the rest of their lives.
One interesting possible myth is that nobody dies at Disney World. Rumor has it that if somebody has a tragic episode and is near death there, they are kept on life support until after they are off the property. So if you want to live forever, go to Disney World and stay there.
When I was a kid, St. Petersburg near Tampa was a major retirement community, with lots of "oldsters" sunning themselves and enjoying life. The Kids and the Kubs were baseball teams that required all players to be at least 75. The town's nickname was "the home of the newly wed and the nearly dead". Ian Fleiming featured it prominently in his thrilling and delightful novel Live And Let Die, where James Bond and Felix Leiter are afraid to fire their guns because the shots might give someone a heart attack. The drama in that book is about gold smuggling, not geriatrics.
A lot of life-long Floridians I have known moved to North Carolina, northern Georgia, and eastern Tennessee. Can't say that I blame them either. It's good to have a change of scenery in life.
