COVERAGE: Rich, Poor Gaps Show Up in Life Expectancy

The rich don't just live differently than you and I. They live longer.

Despite a growing push to close the minority health gaps, new data shows that the life expectancy between rich and poor has widened. In 1980, wealthy people's life expectancy was on average 2.8 years longer than poor people's. Twenty years later, it had increased to 4.5 years. One of the experts who found these disturbing trends, Dr. Gopal Singh, told the New York Times that "life expectancy was higher for the most affluent in 1980 than for the most deprived group in 2000."

The reasons for the gap are many and complex, but one screams out to us: lower income people are less likely to have health insurance. Without it, they are less likely to receive checkups, screenings, diagnostic tests, prescription drugs and other types of care. They are less likely to get timely access to detection, and treatment, of cancer and heart disease.

Don't fall into the trap that the life expectancy gap is inevitable, or that the right social policies can't change it. Nancy Krieger, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, has studied deaths before the age of 65 and infant mortality from 1960 to 2002. The socioeconomic gaps decreased from 1966 to 1980. Then they widened.

Krieger says that the progress in the earlier period occurred when Medicaid and Medicare, community health centers, the "war on poverty" and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 all probably contributed to the earlier narrowing of health disparities.

PBS next month airs a four-part series looking at various aspects of the health gaps: Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick. Here's a preview: