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According to a report by the Congressional Research Service (PDF hosted on Cloudflare; archived copy here),
Although life expectancy has generally been increasing over time in the United States, researchers have long documented that it is lower for individuals with lower socioeconomic status (SES) compared with individuals with higher SES. Recent studies provide evidence that this gap has widened in recent decades. For example, a 2015 study by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) found that for men born in 1930, individuals in the highest income quintile (top 20%) could expect to live 5.1 years longer at age 50 than men in the lowest income quintile. This gap has increased significantly over time. Among men born in 1960, those in the top income quintile could expect to live 12.7 years longer than men in the bottom income quintile. This NAS study finds similar patterns for women: the life expectancy gap between the bottom and top income quintiles of women expanded from 3.9 years for the 1930 birth cohort to 13.6 years for the 1960 birth cohort.
Apparently, all the advances in medical science and healthy living that occurred during this rolling 30-year interval were visited upon the rich a lot more than on the poor.
According to a different study (open; DOI 10.1001/jamainternmed.2017.0918; archived copy here) in JAMA Internal Medicine,
[...] inequalities in life expectancy among counties are large and growing, and much of the variation in life expectancy can be explained by differences in socioeconomic and race/ethnicity factors, behavioral and metabolic risk factors, and health care factors.
In 2014, there was a spread of 20.1 years between the counties with the longest and shortest typical life spans based on life expectancy at birth.
—NPR
additional coverage:
- Boston Globe (about CRS report)
- WPVI-TV (about JAMA study)
- Time (about JAMA study; Javascript required)
- WESA-FM (about JAMA study)
- The Park Record (about JAMA study)
(Score: 2) by fadrian on Tuesday May 30 2017, @12:13AM
Because the theory of social Darwinism wasn't enough - we needed to bring it into being and promote it via our for-profit medical system. People should understand the endgame here: If you have no utility (as defined by the current powers), you should die - quickly, if at all possible. And, if you don't have the good graces to do it quickly enough, we will help you along. It's better for our new social Darwinist society - you just don't need the dead weight of useless "eaters". Much more efficient that way after all, and that's what economic theory teaches us - efficiency is the main good. You know what else is inefficient? Democracy. An oligarchy is much more efficient, if you can't manage an outright dictatorship. I hope the idiots are happy now. Democracy is fragile. It only takes one stupid vote to crush it.
That is all.