A new study from the Journal of the American Medical Association confirms what a lot of analyses have already shown: The wealthy live longer lives.
But the report also offers this twist: The life expectancy of the poor varies wildly depending on where they live.
Researchers at Harvard, MIT and other institutions pored over 1.4 billion records from the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service for the study. They found that low-income people in certain parts of Nevada or Oklahoma live shorter lives than low-income people in wealthier states like California or New York.
The authors haven't come up with reasons to explain the link.
Guests:
Michael Stepner, co-author of the study published in JAMA, titled “The Association Between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States, 2001-2014”. He is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Michael Cannon, director of healthcare policy studies at CATO Institute