• Posted April 3, 2025

Even Wealthy Americans Die Younger Than Europeans

Death comes for everyone, be they rich or poor.

But no amount of money will help Americans live longer than Europeans, a new study says.

Even the richest Americans face shorter lifespans compared to well-heeled Europeans, according to results published April 2 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

And in some cases, wealthy Americans have survival rates on par with poor Europeans living in western nations like Germany, France and the Netherlands, researchers said.

"The findings are a stark reminder that even the wealthiest Americans are not shielded from the systemic issues in the U.S. contributing to lower life expectancy, such as economic inequality or risk factors like stress, diet or environmental hazards,” senior researcher Irene Papanicolas, director of the Center for Health System Sustainability at the Brown University, said in a news release.

“If we want to improve health in the U.S., we need to better understand the underlying factors that contribute to these differences — particularly amongst similar socioeconomic groups — and why they translate to different health outcomes across nations,” she added.

For the study, researchers compared health data from the U.S. against different parts of Europe among people ages 50 to 85. Starting in 2010, the team tracked people to see how long they lived.

Results showed that across every wealth level, death rates are higher in the U.S. than in Europe.

Across the globe, wealthy people tend to live longer. The wealthiest 25% had a death rate 40% lower than those in the poorest 25%.

But people in Western Europe died at rates about 40% lower than Americans, Southern Europeans at rates about 30% lower, and Eastern Europeans at rates 13% to 20% lower, results show.

The wealthiest Americans had shorter lifespans on average than the wealthiest Europeans, and in some cases even fared worse than poorer Europeans, researchers found.

Meanwhile, the poorest Americans “appeared to have the lowest survival among all wealth groups in the study sample,” researchers wrote.

These findings indicate that a weaker social net, more complex health care system, and even lifestyle factors like smoking and diet are trimming years off the lives of Americans across all wealth groups, researchers said.

“Fixing health outcomes is not just a challenge for the most vulnerable — even those in the top quartile of wealth are affected,” lead researcher Sara Machado, a research scientist at Brown’s Center for Health System Sustainability, said in a news release.

In fact, the study found a “survivor effect” in the U.S. that is creating an illusion of decreasing wealth inequality as people age. In actuality, the gap between rich and poor continues to expand.

Poorer Americans in worse health are more likely to die earlier, leaving behind a population that appears healthier and wealthier. It looks like wealth inequality declines among seniors, but this is partly due to the early deaths of the poorest people.

“While wealth inequality narrows after 65 across the U.S. and Europe, in the U.S. it narrows because the poorest Americans die sooner and in greater proportion,” Papanicolas said.

The study indicates that for all the talk of American exceptionalism, the U.S. could learn a lot about better, healthier living from Europe, researchers said.

“If you look at other countries, there are better outcomes, and that means we can learn from them and improve," Machado said. “It’s not necessarily about spending more — it’s about addressing the factors we’re overlooking, which could deliver far greater benefits than we realize.”

More information

KFF has more on U.S. life expectancy compared to other countries.

SOURCE: Brown University, news release, April 2, 2025