I did not read the Washington Post article, but I did read a similar article in the NYT.
Here's a link to the original study:
JAMA Network | JAMA | The Association Between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States, 2001-2014
I have all sorts of thoughts (ha ha) but I found it interesting that the women in Honolulu had a shorter life expectancy than the women in Detroit. (Excluding race/ethnicity). Of course, both were in the bottom five, but still...
Caveat: The life expectancy after age 76 was estimated, not directly measured.
The statistics and estimations are "race and ethnicity adjusted".(IOW, the team needed to adjust for race and ethnicity because blacks are more likely to have a shorter life expectancy and Hispanics tend to have a greater life expectancy, aka the "Hispanic Paradox").
OTOH, "[L]ife expectancy for low-income individuals was
positively correlated with the
local area fraction of immigrants (
r = 0.72,
P < .001),
fraction of college graduates (
r = 0.42,
P < .001), and
government expenditures (
r = 0.57,
P < .001)." (I don't know how they disentangled the race/ethnicity variable from the fraction of immigrants.)
Other important conclusions:
"[G]eographic differences in life expectancy for individuals in the lowest income quartile were significantly correlated with health behaviors such as
smoking (
r = −0.69,
P < .001), but were
not significantly correlated with access to medical care, physical environmental factors, income inequality, or labor market conditions."
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