We’ve known for a long time that the wealthy live longer than the poor.
It makes sense: rich people can afford better health care. They can afford healthier food. They live without the existential stress of poverty caused by the threat of eviction, foreclosure or abject destitution.
But new research shows that even as the life expectancy rises for most Americans, the rising tide is not helping people who live in poverty. In fact, the poor could actually be dying earlier.
That’s according to a new report published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, who wrote the analysis at the request of Congress.
“The bottom of the socioeconomic distribution isn’t experiencing any material increase in life expectancy,” the report’s author, Peter Orszag, told the Washington Post.
The life expectancy matters when it comes to calculating who will benefit from federal safety net programs. The wealthy will actually collect more in Social Security benefits, since they will live longer, the report found.
“Our major entitlement programs — Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and Supplemental Security — have come to deliver disproportionately larger lifetime benefits to higher-income people because, on average, they are increasingly collecting those benefits over more years than others,” reads the study’s description.
The richest men have a life expectancy of 88.8, compared to the poorest, who live 76.1 years on average, the study found.
Here are charts showing how the data break down, per the Washington Post.
And here’s that same chart for women:
Featured homepage image by David Fulmer on Flickr.
