I dunno, "living longer" is one of the least offensive ways someone can get disproportionately more money from taxpayers. I think the focus should be on the opioid epidemic that is shortening middle-aged people's lives.
https://www.thenation.com/article/why-are-poor-americans-dyi...
As for how socioeconomic inequalities translate into inequities in life span, “It’s rather mysterious,” said Lisa Berkman, the director of the Center for Population and Development Studies at Harvard University. One answer is that low-income people tend to be sicker in the first place, because the neighborhoods they can afford to live in are more polluted; because they can’t afford to adopt and maintain healthy behaviors; because they can’t afford health insurance premiums, copayments, and prescription drugs.
Woolf accounts much of the disparity in death rates to what he calls “stress-related conditions.” People who aren’t secure economically are likely to experience high levels of stress, which studies have linked to shorter lifespans and a heightened risk of death from strokes, heart attacks, and other illnesses. “We’re seeing a dramatic increase in deaths from opioids, whether we’re talking about prescription painkiller or heroin, but also from suicides, liver disease, and other conditions that I personally feel come from different ways that people are coping, in an unhealthy way, with the stresses that they’re facing in their daily lives,” Woolf said, particularly since the recession. Smoking, the leading cause of preventable death, takes a particularly costly toll on low-income people.
Berkman traces at least some of the stress load on lower-income Americans to changes in the workplace. The 1920s cohort analyzed by the Brookings researchers had their greatest earnings in the 40s and 50s, a time of economic growth and greater equality across the income spectrum. While low-income people born in the 1940s entered a labor market that was less demanding physically, they may also have experienced greater insecurity as wages stagnated, and difficulty balancing work and family life as more women entered the workforce. Unlike many other peer countries with more robust family support, the United States didn’t do much to accommodate the increased challenges facing working parents, Berkman noted. “The second wave of occupational risk are sets of working conditions that are hugely stressful,” she said. “They aren’t so physically stressful, but they’re socially stressful. They’re insecure, they’re inflexible, or they have no ability to balance work and family issues. We need to rethink what occupational health and safety is.”
That's not what the article is saying. According to the table it gives, the life expectancy of the bottom 20% is still 76.1 years. That's not "young". It is significantly younger than the top 20%.
> wealth inequality is pretty important in terms of quality of life
I think it's hard to make this case just based on life expectancy; what we really need is some way of quantifying how healthy the bottom 20% are from, say, age 60 on (or even earlier), compared to the top 20%. I suspect that this would show a much larger disparity than just the life expectancy data.
It's also worth considering that the lowest 20% is much more likely to encounter violent crime, and also more likely to enlist in the military. I'm sure those things play into lower life expectancy as well.
OTOH, the current high-end contribution impact may be low enough that you don't; certainly a debate can be had on that.