Poor older Americans die younger than rich ones, a Government Accountability Office study reveals.
More than 75% of the richest people who were in their 50s in 1991 were still alive in 2014, in their 70s and 80s. At the other end of the wealth spectrum, less than one-half of the poorest 20% of that age group had survived. Despite life expectancy increasing in that time period, it "has not increased uniformly across all income groups, and people who have lower incomes tend to have shorter lives than those with higher incomes," the report says.
Along with increased life expectancy, the previous few decades also featured increasing income and wealth disparity, interlinked forces that are being wedged further apart. "“Over time, the top fifth of the income distribution is really becoming a lot wealthier—and so much of the health and wealth gains in America are going toward the top,” Harold Pollack, a healthcare expert at the University of Chicago, told The Washington Post. "In these fundamental areas—life expectancy, health—there are these growing disparities that are really a failure of social policy."
The study was requested by Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2016 after he visited McDowell County, West Virginia, which has a life expectancy of 64 years. "We are in a crisis never before seen in a rich, industrialized democracy. […] For three straight years, overall life expectancy in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world has been in decline," he said in a statement reacting to the report. "If we do not urgently act to solve the economic distress of millions of Americans, a whole generation will be condemned to early death."
You can already see the Republicans (including Paul Ryan, who is angling for his next government job) rubbing their hands together in glee over the ballooning deficit they created with their obscene tax cuts, knowing that they can use it to argue to make poor seniors even poorer by cutting Social Security and Medicare.