Wealthy Does Not Make Us Wise

I was astounded, but then again, not so surprised by a headline I saw this past week: “Life Expectancy Is Declining in Some Pockets of the Country.”

What?

Haven’t we Americans been living longer and longer?

Yes, we have—up until now.

According to the National Center for Health Statistics, life expectancy for nearly all Americans has steadily increased since the early 1960s. The number of smokers has gone down (it’s now less than one in five), and the rate of heart disease has decreased. But something happened in the mid-1980s. We began putting on weight and developing all those problems that come with obesity—many of them related to type 2 diabetes: heart and vessel disease, stroke, kidney failure and other life-threatening illnesses.

Experts at Harvard sum it up this way: There are places in the wealthiest country in the world, which spends more on health care than anyone else in the world, where health is getting worse.

Not surprisingly, the places where life span is decreasing are some of the poorer counties in the country; they are in Appalachia, the Southeast, Texas, the southern Midwest and along the Mississippi River. (Life expectancy continues to increase in the Northeast and on the Pacific Coast.)

There also are more African Americans in counties with decreasing life spans.

And one last stat: The differences in life spans between the counties with the lowest life spans and the highest are 11 years in men and 7.5 years in women.

So whose fault is it anyway?

Is the problem the lack of personal responsibility, education and/or access?

Is it the high cost of health care, the unequal distribution of resources, or all of the above or something else altogether?

Tell us what you think.