In a recent Health Affairs blog article, Urban Institute researcher Laudy Aron responded to a new widely publicized study released by two Princeton economists, Angus Deaton and Anne Case, on the startling rise of death rates among middle-aged white Americans.

While Aron acknowledges their study addresses an “urgent national problem,” she argues that by combining data sets for men and women, the study overlooks the even greater health disadvantage for white women. Other commentators have raised concerns about the study’s lack of age adjustment, which may require reinterpretation of the findings. A link to Aron’s  article on the Health Affairs website can be found here.

Aron is a a senior fellow in the Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population at the Urban Institute, one of the partner organizations of the VCU Center on Society and Health, and served as co-editor with director Steven Woolf on the 2013 National Research Council and Institute of Medicine report: US Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health.