The rich are different. For one thing, they live longer — as much as 15 years longer than their poorer compatriots, at least in the U.S.
The Guardian reports that not only do the rich have longer lifespans, but the U.S. health care system itself actually increases the difference in lifespans between rich and poor. Authors of a study published in the British medical journal the Lancet point out in the study that the U.S. health system not only relies on for-profit insurance companies but is the most expensive in the world.
Recommended For You
So how do they suggest we fix our health care system — something Congress has been wrangling over for lo these many years? Simple: treat health care as a human right and make it into a single-payer system.
In addition, the Lancet studies also look at how the American health system affects inequality and structural racism, and how mass incarceration and the Affordable Care Act have changed public health. One of the saddest statistics the studies find is that life expectancy would have grown 51.1 percent more from 1983 to 2005had mass incarceration not exploded in the mid-1980s.
But back to that lifespan gap: The studies not only find the richest 1 percent live up to 15 years longer than the poorest 1 percent, but that the gap in life expectancy between rich and poor has increased in recent decades. In fact, poverty is a pretty accurate predictor of death, with more than a third of low-income Americans not getting needed medical care because they can't afford it.
In Canada, just 7 percent avoid medical care because of costs, while in the U.K. that drops to 1 percent. In addition, the poorest 20 percent of Americans pay twice as much for health care as a share of income as do the rich, forking over 6 percent compared with just 3.2 percent for wealthy Americans.
The poorest among us are the ones on whom the system has taken the biggest toll, the studies find. In fact, life expectancies have fallen in some groups despite advances in treatment, and women in the poorest 20 percent, born between 1930 and 1960, statistically lived four years less than women in the richest 20 percent.
In advocating that the system be converted to single payer, the studies point out that it's not that big a reach. The ACA helped a sizeable portion of the population, with the number of Americans without insurance falling from 48.6 million in 2010 to 28.6 million in 2015 and the number struggling with medical bills falling from 41 percent to 35 percent in 2014.
Related: 10 richest states in America
But when all taxpayer-paid-for programs are looked at together — current public health insurance programs, military health care, the portion of local and state budgets used to purchase private health insurance for workers and subsidies to employers to buy workers health insurance — the studies find that as much as 65 percent of existing health insurance nationally is already being paid for by taxpayers.
© 2025 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
