The data reveals that life expectancies continuously rise with income in the United States. The differences in the increases in life expectancy across income groups and areas suggest that such a policy would have to be conditioned on income and location to maintain current levels of redistribution. That difference – three years – is equivalent to how much national life expectancies would rise if cancer were eliminated. At 40, the richest men could expect to live to 87 while the bottom 1 percent had a life expectancy of just above 72 – equal to the average in a developing country like Sudan. Life expectancy for the poorest five percent, though, barely increased over the same time. Nationwide, the study found, higher median home values and population density are strongly correlated with longer lifespans for the poor-as is a higher percentage of immigrants, another advantage of New York City.
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The gap in life expectancy between the richest one per cent and the poorest one per cent was 14.6 years for men and 10.1 years for women, said the study led by Raj Chetty, an economics researcher at Stanford University.
“If you think about the cancer comparison, having cancer is not just about having a shorter life”.
“The gaps between the rich and the poor are growing rapidly over time“, the site said.
The underlying research is available to the public – with the hope that others will ask: why are health behaviors among the poor so much better in some places than others?
Poor New York men on the other hand live to be about 79.5 years (they have the longest lives) – and are followed by a number of California cities such as San Jose (79.5), Santa Barbara (79.4), Santa Rosa (79), Los Angeles (79), San Fransisco (78.8), and San Diego (78.8).
But among the poor, the differences in what money can buy likely explain an important part of the longevity gap. “There are cities throughout America – from NY to San Francisco to Birmingham, AL – where gaps in life expectancy are relatively small or are narrowing over time“.
“It is as if the top income percentiles belong to one world of elite, wealthy US adults, whereas the bottom income percentiles each belong to separate worlds of poverty, each unhappy and unhealthy in its own way”, Nobel Prize-winning Princeton economist Angus Deaton wrote in an accompanying editorial for the journal. “You want to think specifically about why they’re going poorly in Tulsa and Detroit”, he said, naming two cities where life expectancy among the poor is especially low. But in other cities such as Tampa, Florida, the life expectancy of the poor was actually decreasing over the 2000s. As expected, life expectancy at the age of 40 and above is higher for people with higher incomes.
As with most things in NY, it comes down to money.
The study found measures of health-insurance coverage and health spending were of lesser importance than social and economic factors in determining health for low-income individuals. Or perhaps it’s that more educated, wealthier cities also tend to be more politically progressive, believing in the power of government to make people healthier and to shape what are fundamentally personal decisions about lifestyle.
So there’s a major new study out that looks at health inequality.
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And it’s still better to be rich in Detroit than poor in NY.
