The United States has health disparities along many different dimensions. About 20 years ago, a paper called “Eight Americas” approached this problem by studying groups of people in the U.S. based on where they lived, their racial identity, and their income. We wanted to revive that approach and look at how life expectancy disparities have evolved since 2000.

We had about a 13-year gap in life expectancy across the U.S. groupings in 2000, and by 2010, that gap had grown, spanning 71.2 years to 85.2 years. The decade from 2010 to 2019 was not good for life expectancy in the United States. It really stagnated. In the end, the gap spanned almost 16 years, from 70.2 to 86 years. American Indian and Alaska Native populations had the shortest life expectancies and Asian American populations had the longest. All U.S. groups saw declines in life expectancy during [the COVID-19 years we measured, 2020 and 2021], but the size of the declines really varied.

I do not think there is one solution to this problem, but I would like to see much more attention given to why the United States is so far behind other high-income countries. Research points toward fundamental causes such as income, education, employment opportunities, and housing conditions. There is a little bit of risk in focusing on specific causes of death because it can obscure these society-wide features that are probably responsible.