There's no question as to why wealthy people tend to live longer — they obviously have more money for health care, a balanced diet, and gym memberships, they live in safer neighborhoods, and they are less likely to smoke cigarettes — but the nation's affluent have made such great gains in their life expectancy rates that the life expectancy gap between the haves and have nots continues to grow wider. All the best efforts of health professionals to eliminate health disparities among people of different incomes, races, and ethnicities have not yielded the results they'd hoped for.

After 20 years, the lowest socioeconomic group lagged further behind the most affluent, Dr. Singh said, noting that “life expectancy was higher for the most affluent in 1980 than for the most deprived group in 2000.”

“If you look at the extremes in 2000,” Dr. Singh said, “men in the most deprived counties had 10 years’ shorter life expectancy than women in the most affluent counties (71.5 years versus 81.3 years).” The difference between poor black men and affluent white women was more than 14 years (66.9 years vs. 81.1 years).

Even among people with insurance, there are still the obvious racial health disparities that we hear about all of the time.