Get a free quote

It’s natural but troubling nonetheless that as the wealth gap grows and the middle class is slowly carved away, life expectancy in the U.S. is witnessing a growing gap in life expectancy as healthcare for the rich far outpaces medical care for the rest of us.

Factors include but are not limited to the growing tendency for doctors not accepting Medicaid patients, more adults losing healthcare or paying for minimum healthcare benefits out of pocket.

Dr. Gopal K. Singh, a demographer at the Department of Health and Human Services, found that “the growing inequalities in life expectancy” are observable in all ages, and cover events from infant mortality to heart disease and cancer. As the lowest socioeconomic groups lag farther behind the most affluent, new but costly medical procedures are lie farther beyond reach for a growing segment of the population.

Mohammad Siahpush, a professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (Omaha) created a grand nexus index measuring global socioeconomic factors using data on education, income, poverty, housing, using those factors to classify populations into ten basic groups for his study. His studies confirmed Dr. Singh’s own research finding that in 1980-82 the most affluent group could expect to live 2.8 years longer than people in the most deprived group. By 1998-2000, the gap had increased to 4.5 years. One can only surmise that the gap has grown even greater as new medical technology has been developed (for those who can afford it) and as healthcare costs have skyrocketed.
Smoking has declined significantly in the population with greater education and income, but has stayed the same for the lower socioeconomic population.

Lower income populations are living in areas that have become increasingly more violent, and their diets have not improved. They are less likely to receive check-ups, screenings, diagnostic tests, and they are increasingly more likely to forego prescription drugs and other types of care. The lower wrung of society also are increasingly cut-off from timely health information even from their own doctors, who often view them as “less appropriate candidates” for some types of operations—that is—those procedures which they cannot possibly afford. Why spend time advising patients on advanced treatments when they cannot afford to pay for them in the first place.

This portends an even greater discrepancy in care and life expectancy as more of the baby boomer population, many of whom are part of the new poor, now begin to face health hurdles. Disaster looms unless some sort of across the board program is put in place to level out at least the treatment component of the growing life expectancy disparity. It won’t happen with the Obama healthcare requirement mandating the purchase of insurance. It can only happen if we give serious attention to, gee, I dunno, something like a single-payer healthcare plan, and the sooner the better, for us all.

Sell Your Annuity

Sell Your Lottery Winnings

Structured Settlements

One Response to “Life Expectancy: The Gap Grows”