US LIFESPAN NOT EVEN IN THE TOP 40 WORLDWIDE

And you thought our wonderful healthcare was keeping us all alive....only those with health insurance, it appears:

Unequal America

Elizabeth Gudrais reports for Harvard Magazine: "When Majid Ezzati thinks about declining life expectancy, he says, 'I think of an epidemic like HIV, or I think of the collapse of a social system, like in the former Soviet Union.' But such a decline is happening right now in some parts of the United States.
Between 1983 and 1999, men's life expectancy decreased in more than 50 U.S. counties, according to a recent study by Ezzati, associate professor of international health at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), and colleagues.... The United States no longer boasts anywhere near the world's longest life expectancy. It doesn't even make the top 40.
In this and many other ways, the richest nation on earth is not the healthiest. Ezzati's finding is unsettling on its face, but scholars find further cause for concern in the pattern of health disparities. Poor health is not distributed evenly across the population, but concentrated among the disadvantaged."