Living In Inequality, Dying In Despair: U.S. Lags Behind Life Expectancy Norms
'Living in Inequality, Dying in Despair.' Americans are living a little longer. But we still lag well behind the developed world’s life expectancy norm. As the world’s most unequal developed nation, we shouldn’t be surprised. Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org, Feb. 7, 2020. EXCERPTS:
..The even more troubling reality: Americans are living nowhere near as long as people elsewhere in the developed world. The latest evidence: A new study from the New York-based Commonwealth Fund, released about the same time as the new U.S. lifespan stats, shows that life expectancy in the United States lags significantly behind life expectancy in ten comparable developed nations: Germany, Britain, Canada, Australia, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland.
All these nations, to add insult to injury, spend significantly less on health care than the United States.
Deaton and Case link America’s “deaths of despair” epidemic to the “falling wages and “dearth of good jobs” that typify the nation’s old industrial heartlands, and they trace the origins of this despair back to the early 1970s “when economic growth in the United States slowed, inequality began to rise” and “younger workers realized that they would never do as well as their parents had done.” But not just struggling working families have suffered from America’s growing economic inequality. American middle-income families overall have shorter, less healthy lives than their middle-income counterparts in other developed nations. Inequality itself seems to be a killer.
Most all of us can readily understand how sheer poverty can adversely affect health. But how can higher levels of economic inequality affect the health of people with above-poverty incomes, people who have adequate access to health care? Many epidemiologists — the social scientists who study the health of populations — see stress as the prime villain here..Greater inequality, greater anxiety, greater stress. And that stress pounds daily on our immune systems, leaving us ever weaker and more susceptible to disease, ever more despairing and addicted to whatever may bring us momentary relief, be that doing drugs or bingeing on booze — or devouring comfort foods stuffed with empty calories.
Obesity levels in the United States far outpace the rest of the developed world.
In the middle of the 20th century, the developed world had no huge life expectancy gap between the United States and its peer nations. The United States, back then, also rated as a relatively equal nation. But that has all changed over the last half-century. The United States has now become the world’s most unequal major developed nation. And the more unequal the United States has become, the further behind the United States has fallen in the developed world’s life expectancy rankings...
Read More, https://inequality.org/great-divide/living-in-inequality-dying-in-despair/
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