Trends in Non-Hispanic White Mortality in the United States by Metropolitan-Nonmetropolitan Status and Region, 1990-2016

Abstract

The first decades of the twenty-first century have been a challenging period for American mortality. Life expectancy in the United States ranked 30th in the world in 2010 and is much lower than in other high-income countries (World Health Organization 2017). Between 2010 and 2016, US life expectancy fell further behind other developed countries, increasing by only 0.08 years, the smallest 5-year increase since 1970 (Ho and Hendi 2018). These relatively slow mortality declines occurred against a background in which US mortality in the 1990s and 2000s was already high by the standards of other OECD countries (Ho and Preston 2010; Crimmins et al. 2011; Ho 2013; Institute of Medicine and National Research Council 2013; Palloni and Yonker 2016). At the same time, there have been large and growing geographic and socioeconomic inequalities in health and mortality within the United States (Fenelon 2013; Wang et al. 2013; Hendi 2015, 2017; Chetty et al. 2016; Montez, Sasson, and Hayward 2016a).