Last month, a Lancet report quantified the survival gap between the richest and the poorest Americans and found that the wealthiest 1 percent live ten to 15 years longer than the poorest 1 percent. Well, a new study has an even more bleak finding: some Americans are expected to die a full 20 years earlier than people born in a healthier (and often wealthier) county.
Researchers from the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) looked at death rates across all US counties to measure the geographic disparities in longevity. Public health experts know that people who live in certain parts of the country don't live as long as others and they wanted to see the difference. For their study in JAMA Internal Medicine, the team used de-identified death certificates and federal census data to create annual estimates of life expectancy from 1980 to 2014.
The authors found that Americans' life expectancy at birth increased from 73.8 years to 79.1 years overall during this time period, but they noted that this increase "masks massive variation" at the county level. For instance, people born in Summit County, Colorado (home of ski resort town Breckenridge) could expect to live 86.8 years, compared to the lowest life expectancy in the country of just 66.8 years for those born in Oglala Lakota County, South Dakota, which is home to the Pine Ridge Native American reservation.Continue reading on Tonic.
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