Not even wealth is saving Americans from dying at rates seen among some of the poorest Europeans

[Diamond_Dog]

Fifty years ago, life expectancy in the U.S. and wealthy European countries was relatively similar.

That began to change around 1980. As European life expectancy steadily increased, the U.S. struggled to keep pace — and its life expectancy even began declining in 2014.

Today, the wealthiest middle-aged and older adults in the U.S. have roughly the same likelihood of dying over a 12-year period as the poorest adults in northern and western Europe, according to a study published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Some medical and health policy experts say the trend is a sign of deep-seated issues not just within the U.S. health care system, but with the typical American lifestyle of overconsuming junk food, not getting enough exercise and facing loneliness or financial stress.

(snip)

“Our lifespan has dropped. So Americans now live six years shorter than Europeans. We are the sickest nation in the world and we have the highest rate of chronic disease,” he said last week in a video post on X announcing layoffs of around 20,000 HHS employees.

But Woolf said the Trump administration’s recent gutting of federal health agencies and termination of research grants puts the U.S. on the wrong trajectory when it comes to lowering risk factors for mortality.

“The thing that’s alarming us so much in the health and medicine world is that the policies that are now being pursued in a pretty muscular way are the opposite of what you would want to do to make America healthy again,” he said, referring to Kennedy’s agenda.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/not-even-wealth-saving-americans-dying-rates-seen-poorest-europeans-rcna198929