The day before close to 85,000 Kaiser Permanente workers in several states hit the bricks in the largest healthcare strike in American history, the Washington Post reported the results of an explosive year-long investigation that revealed the country's life expectancy was cratering in large measure thanks to premature deaths due to chronic illness.
"Sickness and death are scarring entire communities in much of the country," the newspaper reported. "The geographical footprint of early death is vast: In a quarter of the nation's counties, mostly in the South and Midwest, working-aged people are dying at a higher rate than 40 years ago," the Post found. "The trail of death is so prevalent that a person could go from Virginia to Louisiana, and then up to Kansas, by traveling entirely within counties where death rates are higher than they were when Jimmy Carter was president."
