of the 20th century at all ages and for all states (plus the District of Columbia), the rankings of the various states or regions in this geographic hierarchy have changed rather little over this time period (National Center for Health Statistics, 1975, 1998). Moreover, in a recent investigation at the county level, Ezzati and colleagues uncovered an even greater range of disparities in life expectancy at birth in the United States, of around 13 years for women and 18 years for men in 1999 (Ezzati et al., 2008). The authors point out that, whereas geographic variability diminished during the 1960s and 1970s, the distribution of e₀ by county in the United States started to diverge from the early 1980s onward. They demonstrated that this divergence—which was more pronounced for women than for men—was due to disparate trends affecting the more and the less advantaged areas of the country, as the former experienced a continuous rise in longevity while the latter experienced stagnation and, in the most extreme cases, a partial reversal of gains achieved in previous decades.

The divergence of the geographic distribution of mean longevity in the United States during the last two decades of the 20th century coincided with a rapid fall in the country’s position in international rankings with respect to various measures of mortality or longevity. The deterioration of the U.S. position is well documented with regard to infant mortality (for a recent discussion on this topic, see in particular MacDorman and Mathews, 2008) but appears to be less well known regarding mortality at older ages.