It’s no news that the U.S. has lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality than most high-income countries. But a magisterial new report says Americans are actually less healthy across their entire life spans than citizens of 16 other wealthy nations.

And the gap is steadily widening.

‘What struck us - and it was quite sobering - was the recurring trend in which the U.S. seems to be slipping behind other high-income countries,’ the lead author of the report, Dr. Steven Woolf, tells Shots.

He says Americans of all ages up to 75 have shorter lives and more illness and injury. (An interactive graphic displaying the main results can be found here.)

Strikingly, even Americans who are white, insured, college-educated and upper-income are worse off than their counterparts around the world - a finding that no one quite understands.

‘People with seemingly everything going for them still live shorter lives and have higher disease rates than people in other countries,’ Woolf says.

The 378-page report was completed under the auspices of the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences. It grew out of an effort last year that concluded the U.S. has a large and widening ‘mortality gap’ among adults over 50 […]