Relatively high social class, low unemployment and access to quality health care cited by experts as reasons for county’s strong showing in Harvard study.
By Tom Murse
Updated Feb 19, 2007 15:52
A new Harvard study of life expectancy in all 3,141 U.S. counties found ours, at 78.5 years, is among the highest.
Why?
Sociologists and health experts here agree that it’s a combination of relatively high social class, low unemployment and — most importantly — access to quality health care.
“I think we’ve got a lot of things going good for us here in Lancaster County,” said Dr. Alan Peterson, a Quarryville geriatrician and director of community and environmental medicine at Lancaster General Hospital.
The life expectancy of children born from 1997 to 2001 here is well above the state and national averages, the study found.
It ranks in the top quartile in the country, and seventh in Pennsylvania. Nationally, the average life expectancy of men and women is 76.9 years.
Carol J. Auster, a professor of sociology at Franklin & Marshall College, said the bottom line here is access to quality health care.
“Differences in life expectancy by county are largely linked to social class and employment issues, which then link people into health care systems and health insurance,” she said.
A relatively affluent population and low unemployment rate here means that, for the most part, we’re treating ourselves fairly well.
As a state, Pennsylvanians live to an average 76.7 years, ranking 31st among all states and Washington, D.C., which came in last at only 72 years.
The findings are part of a broader study that reported startling news: the longest-living Americans can expect to survive decades longer than the worst off — and the explanation is far more complex than poverty alone.
Where you live, combined with race and income, plays a huge role in whether you die young, concluded Dr. Christopher Murray of the Harvard School of Public Health.
The study contends that the differences are so stark it’s as if there are eight separate Americas instead of one — and that those gaps in lifespan have persisted over 20 years despite efforts to tackle them.
“That’s pretty devastating,” said Murray, who published the exhaustive analysis in the online science journal PLoS Medicine. “Whatever it is that we’re doing isn’t working. That’s a wakeup call.”
Murray analyzed mortality data between 1982 and 2001 by county, race, gender and income. He found some distinct groupings that he named the “eight Americas.”
Lancaster County and Pennsylvania are part of a group he called “Middle America,” made up of a mostly white population that earns an average income of $24,640 a year. Their average lifespan: 77.9 years.
Peterson, the Quarryville doctor, said Lancaster County residents have benefitted from a strong network of primary-care physicians and specialists, whereas residents in other parts of the country such as South Dakota, where life expectancy is 66.6 years, do not.
“A lot of those people have to go 200 miles to see a physician, where you only have to go 2 miles here to see one,” he said. “The quality of care here is second to none.”
However, the study was startling in that we here in “Middle America” aren’t the ones with the longest lifespans. We’re edged out by low-income residents of the rural Northern Plains states, where people live to be 79, and Asian-Americans, who live to be 84.9.
The bottom line, Murray contends, is that access to health care isn’t the only factor. His government-funded study shows the problem is far more complex, and that geography plays a crucial role.
Low-income whites in Appalachia and the Mississippi Valley die four years sooner than their Northern neighbors, for example.
“If I were living in parts of the country with those sorts of life expectancies, I would want ... to be asking my local officials or state officials or my congressman, ‘Why is this?’”
(The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
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