The U.S. has substantially worse health outcomes than all its peer nations. In a list of non-communicable disease mortality in 17 high-resource countries, the U.S. has the second-highest death rate at 418 deaths per 100,000 people.
Although American life expectancy has improved over time along with that of other countries, it has improved at a slower rate, resulting in the US falling substantially behind our peers. But this has not always been the case. Take the example of female life expectancy at birth (Figure 2). The U.S. was in the middle of the group of peer countries as recently as 1980. However, in the intervening 35 years, while all countries have improved, we have fallen behind, improving at a far slower rate.
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