Americans may have won the Revolutionary War, but 230 years later they’re losing the battle for good health to the British. An extensive new study comparing the health of middle-aged, white residents of both countries finds that ‘we get sicker, sooner,’ according to American co-researcher James Smith, a senior economist at Rand Corp. The gap between the two countries is significant, despite the fact that people in the United States have a standard of living that is 25 percent higher than their counterparts across the Atlantic, and that they spend more than double on health care than the British — $5,274 per capita vs. $2,164, respectively. The health gap between the two nations ‘persists even after you take out things such as the large role of African-Americans with very poor health in the United States, or that people may be reporting health differences differently in the two countries,’ Smith said. ‘We also looked at biological markers of disease — you take away the fact that there may be risk-factor differences in obesity, smoking and drinking.’ Even with those factors taken into account, ‘you are basically back where you started,’ Smith said. ‘You find enormous differences in […]