I noticed this a decade ago. In US terms, I'm a late baby boomer (in the UK, I was born at the start of the baby bust—the birthrate fell dramatically around when I was born). People my age or a little older are mostly sicker than their parents, yes, poorer than their parents, and dying younger than those of my parents' generation who survived WW2. I don't think it's just the US and Russia, either, and I think the article places altogether too much emphasis on addiction. (After all, alcohol and tobacco addictions are responsible for many early deaths in my parents' and grandparents' generations. I think that's a War on Drugs deflection, conscious or not.) The appalling health-care system in the US is partly to blame; but that was even worse in previous generations, and there were suicides as a result of the 1929 Crash and the Depression. I ascribe much of the difference to stress. We're not told we're the Greatest Generation; we're told we're ungrateful lumps who need to work, work, work. Some of us, if we live, will get to draw Social Security years later, because we are a demographic problem and unworthy. Some of us, and the following generations, probably won't get it at all. And meantime, not just in the US, the productivity screws are really tight.
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I'm glad somebody finally noticed, sort of.