Making more money can benefit health, add years to your life

Income inequality has emerged as one of the predominant themes in this year’s presidential election. And for good reason, as the economic gulf in the U.S. between the haves and have-nots has never been larger.

Now, research is showing that this wealth disparity correlates to a trend that is perhaps even more disturbing: a growing health gap.

It probably comes as no surprise that lower levels of earnings correlate with higher incidences of illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease, stroke and certain forms of cancer. Yet what might come as an eye-opener is the profound effect that income disparities are having on people’s lifespans.

New research has found the neediest among us can expect significantly shorter lives than the most affluent. And the gap between those two groups is increasing at a startling pace.

Economists at the Brookings Institution found that for men born in 1920, life expectancy of male wage earners in the bottom 10 percent was 72.9 years. Those in the top 10 percent could expect to live about 6 years longer, to an average age of 79.1.

Fast forward 30 years to men born in 1950. For the bottom 10 percent, expected lifespan crept up less than a year, to the age of 73.6. Meanwhile, for the top 10 percent, it leapt more than 8 years, to 87.2.

Take a moment and let those figures sink in. In a mere three decades, the gap in lifespans between the affluent and the very poor doubled. If you make $140,000 or more a year, you can now expect to live almost 14 years longer than someone who make $12,000 a year. (These top and bottom 10 percent figures came from an interesting interactive chart I found in The New York Times.)

So what are the big drivers behind this widening chasm?

Smoking certainly plays a role. With richer and more educated people increasingly turning away from tobacco, the damaging effects of smoking are increasingly being borne by those with less money and education. Researchers from Duke University calculated that cigarettes and their kin accounted for roughly one-quarter of the lifespan gap.

Obesity, which has risen sharply in the past 30 years, could be a contributor. But the picture here is a little less black and white. Although obesity levels are higher among those at the bottom end of the income spectrum, the gap between the rich and the poor has actually shrunk since 1990, with levels now at 37 and 31 percent among low and high earners, respectively.

In the past few years, the opioid epidemic has struck poor whites disproportionately. As the abuse of prescription painkillers and heroin continues to surge, we can expect it to exact a greater toll on the lower rungs of the income ladder, further widening lifespan disparities.

With the relatively recent passage of the Affordable Care Act, it’s too early to know the impact of adding 15 million-plus Americans to the health insurance rolls. This dropped the number of uninsured adults, the vast majority of whom were at the low end of the income spectrum, from 18 percent to less than 14 percent.

We can hope that over time, increased access to care will help close the longevity gap.

Still, if you step back, the figures from the Brookings study are pretty shocking. When politicians have talked about the two Americas, they’ve typically discussed privation in terms of material goods, housing and food. Yet it’s also clear that there’s an additional “poverty tax” that can be computed in lost years of life.

As a result of significant public health and treatment advances over the last century, many of us will enjoy longer lives. But we need to find a way to spread these benefits across all income brackets. Indeed, the very health of our country depends on it.