The Death-Gap myth

Despite the fact that John Edward's Two-Americas theory failed miserably to resonate with voters, lefties at Newsweek have identified a new angle to the Two-Americas meme...the death gap between educated and un-educated....

...white men who did not graduate from high school were dying at a rate 2.9 times that of college grads in 1993—and at a rate 4.4 times higher in 2001. For black men, the comparable mortality rates were 2.1 times higher in 1993 and 3.4 times higher in 2001. [similar numbers exist for women of both races]

Conclusion: the widening death gap was due to sharp decreases in mortality from all causes—but especially in heart disease, cancer and stroke, all of which have benefited from new forms of prevention and treatment—among the most educated. The less educated have benefited hardly at all from medical progress.

The poor people in America have no one to blame but themselves and their poor decision-making for their economic situation. In this country, if you stay off drugs, do not get pregnant, finish high school, and then get married, you will not be poor. Educated people have access to better health care because they made good decisions to become educated. Likewise, poor people continue to make the same decisions that made them poor in the first place, so they have the same limited access to health care as they have limited access to everything else. It stands to reason that educated people will generally take better care of themselves and can afford better health care.

Newsweek seems to think that exceptional health-care is a right. Pointing out a "death gap" is their effort to advance the idea that there is unfairness in terms of access to health care. "Unfairness" implies randomness and blame absolution. Once liberals establish the belief among hand-out Americans that it's not their own fault that they have inadequate health care, then it's easy to get them to vote for the socialization of health care. I've got news for them....what happens to you is not a matter of fairness or unfairness. It's a function of your past decisions. We are all of us, nothing but the product of our own decisions up to this point in our lives. There is no big wheel in the sky that determines our lot in life. Our lives are self-determined and we have nobody to blame but ourselves when things don't work out the way we'd like.