Ben Goldacre links to this article by Christopher Murray et al.:
The gap between the highest and lowest life expectancies for race-county combinations in the United States is over 35 y[ears]. We [Murray et al.] divided the race-county combinations of the US population into eight distinct groups, referred to as the “eight Americas,” to explore the causes of the disparities that can inform specific public health intervention policies and programs. . . . Asians, northland low-income rural whites, Middle America, low-income whites in Appalachia and the Mississippi Valley, western Native Americans, black Middle America, low-income southern rural blacks, and high-risk urban blacks.
The graphs are hard to read, but I do like that they ordered the 8 categories in decreasing order of life expectancy. I’ve never actually understood how “life expectancy at birth” is defined, but I assume these people know what they’re doing. There’s something funny about having 8 categories, where one category includes over 2/3 of the people It’s unusual to see my family counted in “Middle America,” so I shouldn’t complain.
I don't think that expected life at birth is a particularly good measure. Does it include premature births? A more informative measure is the force of mortality function (hazard rate). Why not plot that for each of the groups. This way we can see if any of the groups is subject to premature aging? It's hard to express a vector idea as a scaler.