Southern woman
Credit: UPI
There’s more grim news about inequality in America.
New research documents significant disparities in the life spans of Americans depending on where they live. And those gaps appear to be widening, according to the research.
“It’s dramatic,” says Christopher Murray, who heads the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. He helped conduct the analysis, published Tuesday in JAMA Internal Medicine.
Health experts have long known that Americans living in different parts of the country tend to have different life spans. But Murray’s team decided to take a closer look, analyzing records from every U.S. county between 1980 and 2014.
“What we found is that the gap is enormous,” Murray says. 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.
In counties with the longest life spans, people tended to live about 87 years, while people in places with the shortest life spans typically made it to only about 67, the researchers found.
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Looking at the state of our diet, health, and lifestyles, you really have to wonder if assisted suicide has been made legal nationally. If assisted suicide hasn’t been federally legislated, there’s certainly a profit motive in it that many large industries have embraced.
I wonder what sort of sea change would be necessary in the FDA to replace all the industry insiders with academics? Then, to have tobacco-style warning labels placed on all foods and drinks with calorie and saturated fat levels exceeding certain levels? Then, to have gardening, cooking, money management, and simple walking (!) classes made mandatory for all students, every year of school? I know, I’m dreaming… where’s the profit motive in any of this?