Over the past 50 years, New York has increased the life expectancy of the average resident by 8 years, it’s 2 years in Kentucky
Female life expectancy in the Southern states (AL, AR, KY, LA, MS, WV) trails New York by 17 years largely due to maternal health issues.
(( “For females born in some Southern states, life expectancy increased by less than three years from 1900 to 2000,” said Theodore R. Holford, the Susan Dwight Bliss Professor Emeritus of Biostatistics at YSPH and lead author of the study. “That’s a staggering contrast when you consider that in states like New York and California, life expectancy rose by more than 20 years over the same period.” }}
Most life expectancy data is collected based on where someone resides when they die. So wouldn’t states, such as Florida, get an artificial bump up based on the fact that they get healthier/wealthier retirees moving there? And the reverse for states people want to move out of for retirement?
There are certainly differences by state. At the same time the authors purposively excluded race in their calculations. Life expectancy and mortality rates are quite different between, for example, blacks and whites. Corrections need to be made for this factor. For example, in New York for blacks 18.5% die between the ages of 55-64. For whites it is 10.5%. Blacks comprise 18% of the New York population while the percent in Mississippi is 38%.
Yes. But black people in New York live a lot longer than black people in Mississippi. Either New York is doing something that’s making black people more healthy, or Mississippi is doing something that’s making them less healthy. I wonder what that could be ???
Black people in New York live 7.2 years longer than their brothers and sisters in Mississippi.
Easy to explain…always exception to a trend. NY could have better doctors and hospitals and they export a lot of health/wealthy seniors elsewhere while other states don’t or are the retirement destinations.
One study I’d like to see is the “life expectancy of Top 1% income/wealth by state”. Presumably the wealthy folk in Mississippi and Alabama could afford to travel to Johns Hopkins or the Mayo Clinic for their health care if required, and their longevity should approach that of the wealthy folk in New York and California. Or does growing up in a culture of poor life choices and inadequate health care doom one to a shorter life span in spite of their wealth?
This is probably an issue more of those in the top 10% (or some other percentage larger than 1%) that can afford to go to Mayo, and the fact that poor states have much poorer top X% where some of those can’t afford the most expensive care.
I don’t think access to the most expensive care is the real driver, although I’m sure it helps. The real drivers are things like not being able to afford medicine, limited access to transportation which makes keeping medical appointments difficult, relying on cheap processed food for calories, living in environments with higher exposure to pollution and violence, stress induced by income security in general, and so on.
