The New York Times reports new government research has found “large and growing” disparities in life expectancy for richer and poorer Americans paralleling the growth of income inequality in the last two decades. There is now a four-and-a-half-year gap in the life expectancy between the country’s most affluent and most deprived. In the early 1980s, the gap was less than three years. The gap between poor African American men and affluent white women is now more than fourteen years.