American life expectancy lags

Institute for New Economic Thinking  - For all the talk about American exceptionalism, here’s a shocking truth: when it comes to health and longevity, the U.S. has been losing ground for decades. Not just behind wealthy nations, but behind less affluent countries. Even poor ones. The gap isn’t shrinking; it’s widening.

That’s what public health researcher Steven H. Woolf, professor of family medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, has documented. By 2019, just before COVID-19 hit, U.S. life expectancy ranked 40th among the world’s most populous countries, trailing places like Albania and Lebanon. The pandemic only made things worse: by 2020, the U.S. had fallen to 46th, as six more nations overtook it.

Woolf hasn’t just compared the U.S. to wealthy countries like Canada, Germany, or the U.K. He looked at life expectancy across dozens of nations with very different histories and economies, and the results are startling. The U.S. began falling behind as early as the 1950s, with countries in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East steadily overtaking it.

If you were born in Albania today, you’d have a longer life expectancy than if you were born in the United States — and that’s been true for several years. Let that sink in.

Woolf argues that America’s exceptionalism is not about health but rather how it’s approached. Policy choices, social conditions, and deep inequalities are driving a health disadvantage that hits hardest in the Midwest and South, where life expectancy has stalled or even declined while other nations, and some U.S. states, keep moving.