How Class Kills

[TBF]

A recent study showing rising mortality rates among middle-aged whites drives home the lethality of class inequality.

The story is incomplete, however, without the critical element of class. While the study provides evidence of more acute suffering within the demographic as a whole, the increase in overall mortality was restricted to those with no more than a high school education.

by A. W. Gaffney 11-8-15

Good health — like wealth — does not trickle down the economic ladder. That’s one conclusion that should be drawn from a widely covered paper published this past week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, albeit for reasons that may not be immediately apparent.

The paper — authored by Anne Case and recent Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton, both of Princeton University — presents an alarming finding: middle-aged white (non-Hispanic) Americans experienced a stunning reversal in mortality trends in the early twentieth-first century, unique among demographic groups. Between 1999 and 2013, this group saw a major — and previously unnoticed — rise in mortality.

The magnitude of this phenomenon becomes clear in the investigators’ conclusion: “The mortality reversal observed in this period bears a resemblance to the mortality decline slowdown in the United States during the height of the AIDS epidemic.”

Much more here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/11/case-deaton-study-death-rate-health-care/