The 12 Worst States for Older Adults' Life Expectancy Losses

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took two years to publish the final U.S. State Life Tables for 2021. The government will use the tables to run programs like Social Security and Medicare, and life insurance and annuity issuers will use the tables, along with information about insurers' own experience, to create the life expectancy tables at the heart of life insurance policies, annuities and financial professionals' planning software. The final 2021 state tables show, in the language of math, how much time the COVID-19 pandemic, opioid addiction, alcoholism and related problems robbed from Americans in 2021. In 2021, in the typical state, a 65-year-old could expect to live 18.4 more years. That was about three weeks better than in 2020, when COVID was hitting the hardest and people still had trouble getting masks or hand sanitizer, let alone vaccines. But it was about 1.1 years worse than in 2019. The loss ranged from about 0.4 months, in South Dakota, up to more than 1.7 years, in one state that's been popular with retirees. The people who died early lost time they could have used to travel, attend a child's wedding or see a grandchild learn to talk. Mortality was higher for lower-income people than for higher-income people, but plenty high for higher-income people. For a look at the 12 states with the worst lost of life expectancy at age 65 between 2019 and 2021, see the gallery above. (If we had included the District of Columbia in the gallery, it would have ranked second.) For all data for all 50 states and the District of Columbia, see the table below.