One of the amazing things about these times is how some storied get reported - and absolutely no one cares. Because they do not effect the rich or the educated. One example: discussions about the fiscal cliff seldom mention the tax increase that is coming for people who make FICA payments.
Here is another:
Four studies in recent years identified modest declines, but a new one that looks separately at Americans lacking a high school diploma found disturbingly sharp drops in life expectancy for whites in this group. Experts not involved in the new research said its findings were persuasive.
snip....
The steepest declines were for white women without a high school diploma, who lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008, said S. Jay Olshansky, a public health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the lead investigator on the study, published last month in Health Affairs. By 2008, life expectancy for black women without a high school diploma had surpassed that of white women of the same education level, the study found.
White men lacking a high school diploma lost three years of life. Life expectancy for both blacks and Hispanics of the same education level rose, the data showed. But blacks over all do not live as long as whites, while Hispanics live longer than both whites and blacks.
What is amazing is how little press this received. It didn't make the front page here, for example. And yet the decline in life expectancy we are talking about is nearly as large as the 7 year drop Russia saw after the end of the Soviet Union.