What actually leads to premature deaths among Americans. Obesity? No. Poverty? Yes.
It looks like education level is the main thing predicting whether people get a life-threatening illness in the first place. This is related to health behaviors. Smoking rates are a perfect example: They’ve gone down among all groups, but they’re way down among people with a college education.
But the onset of illness and the progression of illness are two different stories. Once you’re sick, income becomes much more important. The issue becomes how you manage it, which determines whether people die from the illness and if so, how soon. Access to medical care is part of the story, but it’s not the entire story. Even if everyone in the country had the exact same health insurance and the exact same access to care, we would still see these disparities — as we do in countries that have national health insurance.
