Oct. 3 at 6:00 a.m.
University of Oxford professor John Bell, a native of Canada, offers a sobering assessment of what other high-income nations see when they view life expectancy in the United States.
“You know you’ll never be last, because America is always last,” Bell said.
It is a paradox that confounds the world: The United States is among the wealthiest nations in history, and yet its citizens die earlier than those in some poorer nations.
It wasn’t always this way. In 1980, the United States was in the middle of the pack of wealthy nations, according to a detailed analysis of more than 40 years of life expectancy data by The Washington Post.