Good health — like wealth — does not trickle down the economic ladder.

That’s one conclusion that should be drawn from a widely covered paper published this past week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, albeit for reasons that may not be immediately apparent.

The paper — authored by Anne Case and recent Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton, both of Princeton University — presents an alarming finding: middle-aged white (non-Hispanic) Americans experienced a stunning reversal in mortality trends in the early twentieth-first century, unique among demographic groups. Between 1999 and 2013, this group saw a major — and previously unnoticed — rise in mortality.