The first of the two reports, released two weeks ago by the Congressional Budget Office, declared that the life expectancy gap is growing between rich and poor and between those with the highest and lowest educational attainment, even as it is narrowing between men and women and between blacks and whites.
But something new and disturbing is now underway: The life expectancy gap is accelerating.
Evidence now suggests that the life expectancy gap is increasing, at least here the United States, which raises troubling questions about the fairness of current efforts to protect Social Security.
The largest increases in the life expectancy gap were seen for people with other psychoses (14.8 to 22.7 years for males and 14.1 to 22.6 years for females) and stress or adjustment reactions (7.3 to 13.2 years for males and −0.2 to 9.3 years for females, table 2).
The report found while things are going well in some areas, such as early childhood education, in others, such as reading, writing and numeracy and life expectancy, the gap is hardly closing.
One of the most striking contributors to the narrowing life expectancy gap, though, was poisonings.
Increasing income inequality across the country over 10 years had the effect of widening inequalities in life expectancy, whereas the decreasing unemployment gap was associated with reduced health inequalities.
11 Less dramatically, they suggested that 20 33% of the life expectancy gap could be attributable to higher rates of obesity.
[ 6] Canadian women have a longer health-adjusted life expectancy than men, [ 7] although the sex gap is less pronounced than that of life expectancy.
The increased gap is largely driven by increasing life expectancy in the general population rather than a reduction in life expectancy in psychiatric patients.
