Wealth-->Health

Over winter break my family visited a very close friend of ours in California who, I discovered on this particular visit, is now eighty-eight years old. With majority of my grandparents passing away before reaching eighty, it came as a shock to me that she is able to live independently and is still sharp as a tack.

To me she has always been the sweet, old lady who sends me generous checks on my birthday and around christmas time. Putting two and two together, I can't help but suspect that her long life span must have something to do with the fact that she is and always has been wealthy.

Supporting this idea, I found an article from USA Today which talks about a psychologist who has conducted experiments indicating that health is not only determined by your genes, but by "your income, education...address," and even "the status your parents had when you were small. [See article here] This notion makes sense to me because the wealthier a person, the more easily they have access to medical care. Since America is full of plenty of wealthy people one would expect the country's average life expectancy to be a high number. After looking into this, I was surprised to see that in the CIA World Factbook the United States had only the fiftieth highest life expectancy. You can see the rankings here.

Does this mean that in actuality health and wealth do not have a strong correlation? Is one's longevity based more solely on genetics? Why don't Americans have a higher life expectancy?