Join the one percent and live a decade longer

The wealthiest Americans can expect to live at least a decade longer than the poorest — and that gap, as with income inequality, is growing ever wider.

New research in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows top earning Americans gained 2 to 3 years of life expectancy between 2001 and 2014, while those at the bottom gained little or nothing. Plenty of research has already shown that health and wealth are intertwined, and that they generallyimprove in tandem as you move up the income scale. But this year, wildly divergent incomes among Americans and the vanishing middle class have been central issues in a vitriolic race for the White House. Today’s JAMA research shows in the starkest terms yet how disparities in wealth are mirrored by life expectancy, and how both are getting worse.