Of all the affluent nations in the world, the United States is the one whose citizens die youngest. Despite spending thousands of dollars more per capita on health care than any other country, Americans in 2019 nevertheless faced a relatively low life expectancy of 78.8 years, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. (Based on preliminary data from 2020, the pandemic knocked it down a full year.)
That may not seem tragically young. It’s certainly a vast improvement over the figure for 1919. Throughout the 20th century, lives grew longer across much of the world, rising by nearly a decade in the U.S. between 1959 and 2017. But the rise slowed here in the 1980s, finally plateaued in 2010, and declined for three consecutive years after 2014. Our peers continued to climb all the while, with Japan leading at 84.3 years and many others well above 80. On a list of countries ranked by life expectancy, the U.S. is ranked somewhere in the mid-40s, in the company of Ecuador, Turkey and Croatia.
