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April 12, 2016

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Study finds rich outlive poor by 15 years in US

THE richest Americans tend to outlive the poorest by almost 15 years, and that gap has grown since 2001, a major study of income and life expectancy revealed.

The findings, published on Sunday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, were based on more than 1 billion tax records from 1999 to 2014, as well as government mortality statistics.

The gap in life expectancy between the richest 1 percent and the poorest 1 percent 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.

“For example, men in the bottom 1 percent of the income distribution at the age of 40 years in the United States have life expectancies similar to the mean life expectancy for 40-year-old men in Sudan and Pakistan,” the study said. “There was a larger increase in life expectancy for higher income groups during the 2000s.”

The rich tended to live even longer — by more than two years for men and almost three years for women between 2001 and 2014. “Life expectancy did not change for individuals in the bottom 5 percent of the income distribution,” it said.

Researchers said factors found to affect life expectancy among the poor included smoking and obesity. Where people lived also made a difference.

The shortest life expectancies in the lowest income groups were seen in Nevada, Indiana and Oklahoma — 77.9 years — while the longest-lived among the poorest Americans were in New York, California and Vermont — 80.6 years.


 

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