America’s lower middle class today is in poorer health and has less savings when they retire, compared to 20 years ago.
This ‘forgotten’ class has a lower life expectancy, is expected to suffer from chronic diseases and enjoy less wealth compared to the previous generation of Americans who had similar incomes in the 1990s.
Lower-middle-class Americans are often overlooked because they earn too much money to qualify for state or federal aid, such as Medicaid, food stamps, or housing vouchers, but they earn too little to have enough resources to to cover the costs. rising costs of healthcare and housing.
In a study published Wednesday, researchers analyzed the health and economic well-being of select cohorts of middle-aged Americans between 1994 and 2018. They gathered data from the National Institute on Aging-sponsored Health and Retirement Study, a longitudinal survey of U.S. households with at least one adult age 51 or older.
The study participants spanned multiple races and consisted of men and women aged 53 to 58 in the US.
This figure shows life expectancy from age 60 for lower middle and upper middle class men and women in the US
The study shows that the healthy life expectancy of people aged 60 has increased by five percent over the past 24 years, to about 84 years for women and 78 years for men.
“The public conversation about inequality tends to focus on the challenges facing only the most vulnerable populations,” said Bryan Tysinger, study co-author and director of health policy simulation at the USC Schaeffer Center.
“But our models showed that there was an important difference in the center of the economic distribution.”
While there are no hard limits on what defines the middle class, data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that it includes people earning between $38,000 and $114,400 per year.
Prior to the study, the individual incomes of people identified by researchers as lower middle class were $31,110, and the average for those considered upper middle class was $57,233 over the 24 years measured.
The study shows that the healthy life expectancy of people aged 60 has increased by five percent over the past 24 years, to about 84 years for women and 78 years for men.
Healthy life expectancy remained largely unchanged over the study period for people in the lower economic class, with life expectancy expected to be 78 years for women and 75 years for men.
Research also shows that people’s health status worsens at age 50 for both the upper and lower middle classes, but the rate at which it deteriorates is faster for those in the lower class.
While in 1994 about a fifth of higher incomes smoked, that number has halved in 2018. About a third of people on lower incomes smoked in 1994, a number that was virtually unchanged in 2018.
The number of people reporting chronic pain increased in both cohorts, but increased faster among lower earners.
One area with the reverse trend was obesity. Overall, more men and women were obese in both economic classes in 2018 than in 1994.
However, the percentage of higher-earning men was higher than lower-earning men in 2018 and increased faster. In 2018, the percentage of obese men in the upper middle class (about half) surpassed that of obese men in the lower middle class (about a third).
In women, obesity increased at about the same rate in both classes.
“Our findings suggest that today’s lower middle class will spend a greater proportion of their older lives in poor health,” said Jack Chapel, lead author of the study.
For example, an average 60-year-old woman in the lower middle segment will turn 84 in 2018. We predict that nearly 40 percent of her remaining years will live with a disability – an increase since 1994.”
Not only have life expectancy and the health gap between classes widened, but the wealth gap has also widened. From 1994 to 2018, the combined financial worth of upper middle class people at age 60 grew by 13 percent. Wealth hardly grew in the lower middle class, by only three percent.
In addition, home ownership, and the wealth that comes with it, fell dramatically for the lower middle class between 1994 and 2018. While home ownership was about 10 percent lower than that of the upper middle class in 1994, the difference has tripled in 2018.
“Our study projects: Lower-middle-class Americans will spend a greater portion of their remaining lives with significant health care needs, but without more economic resources to meet those needs than comparable cohorts had 20 years earlier,” said Dana Goldman, co-author of the book. study and dean of the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy.