(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
 . . . . . . . . . .



14-year gap between average US lifespan of richest and poorest [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-08-16  

x NEW: I’m not sure people fully appreciate how dire the US life expectancy / mortality situation has got.



My column: https://t.co/dBIhT9eZLv



And some utterly damning charts.



1) at *every* point on the income distribution, Americans live shorter lives than the English. pic.twitter.com/pOoziEK5mZ — John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) March 31, 2023

John Burn-Murdoch posted this on X with a “Share” link, so I’m assuming it’s alright to share. It’s from a Financial Times article he wrote, which is sadly behind a paywall. What struck Kevin Drum was that the gap holds at every level of income. But as he notes,

However, the difference in UK/USA life expectancy isn't what really strikes me about this chart. Rather, it's the fact that both countries show almost identical curves based on income. In Britain, the richest live 11 years longer than the poorest; in the US it's 14 years. The difference within each country dwarfs the difference between them.https://jabberwocking.com/the-rich-live-a-lot-longer-than-the-poor/#comments

This should be emailed to every politician considering raising the age for Social Security accessibility. It makes me want to scream. My family is comprised to a large degree of those on the lower end of the income scale. As I have noted elsewhere in DK, the four of my six brothers who did not get a college degree were all dead by 55 and so didn’t touch their social security — though I do note the children survivor benefits helped a widow, and niece and nephew until they were 18. (The other three weren’t married.) And it was the disparities in healthcare that definitely led to one death and contributed to another. Looking at the chart, one sees average life expectancy for the poorest Americans is 70 years—and full social security retirement for those born after 1960 is 67 already in the US.

And those poor slobs on the minimum wage want to soak US for three years of easy living?!

These kinds of clear stats need to be shown, like this, in easy-to-understand graph form. This one clearly shows the benefits of being richer—and of a universal healthcare system.

The chart in preventable deaths is one reason for the mostly 6-year disparity in average life expectancy. But so are the “deaths of despair” goosed in large part by the pushing of certain opioids in the US:

4,859 deaths related to drug poisoning were registered in 2021 in England and Wales, equivalent to a rate of 84.4 deaths per million people; this is 6.2% higher than the rate recorded in 2020 (79.5 deaths per million). https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsrelatedtodrugpoisoninginenglandandwales/2021registrations#main-points

More than one million people have died since 1999 from a drug overdose.1 In 2021, 106,699 drug overdose deaths occurred in the United States. The age-adjusted rate of overdose deaths increased by 14% from 2020 (28.3 per 100,000) to 2021 (32.4 per 100,000).https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/deaths/index.html

So, if my math is correct, 79.5 deaths per millions in the UK vs 283 deaths per million in the US.

There are no easy answers for the overdose deaths in this country, but it seems clear that a universal healthcare system, even one as stressed as the UK’s NHS, would give the poorer among us a leg up in life expectancy while reducing the income-related death gap between ricest and poorest from the the atrocious 14 years in the US to the merely disgusting 11 years of the UK.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/16/2187614/-14-year-gap-between-average-US-lifespan-of-richest-and-poorest

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/