Preventable deaths, racial disparities, and health care costs were getting worse, even before Covid

American life spans are projected to be shorter today than in 2014, Black people are twice as likely as white people to die of treatable conditions, and health care costs keep going up while gains in health insurance coverage have stalled. Those sobering statistics, from the Commonwealth Fund’s 2020 Scorecard on State Health Performance, are more deeply worrying because they are based on data collected before the Covid-19 pandemic began decimating the jobs people depend on for health insurance. Some states do better than others: Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesoate, Iowa, and Connecticut scored higher on 49 measures of health while West Virginia, Missouri, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Mississippi did the worst. “The novel coronavirus has exposed and exacerbated existing weakness,” the report says.