The resulting "lagging life expectancy" has "coincided with growing income-based and education-based mortality gaps among adults." By 2014, well before Donald Trump, the nation's wealthiest 1 percent were living, on average, 15 years longer than the poorest 1 percent.
Mortality numbers like these helped move the White House to Donald Trump in 2016. His county-level vote share in 2016 closely correlates, the Lancet commission points out, "with mortality trends." Counties where over 60 percent of locals voted for Trump had higher life expectancy in 1980 than those counties where over 60 percent went for Hillary Clinton. But by 2014 these same Trump counties lagged more than two years "behind counties that had voted for Clinton."
"The suffering and dislocation inflicted by COVID-19," the Lancet commission sums up, "has exposed the frailty of the U.S. social and medical order."
We need, the commission concludes, "a new politics" that "rests on a vision of shared prosperity and a kind society."
A sensible prescription.
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