A non-communicable disease as defined by Wikipedia.com is: "… a medical condition or disease that is not caused by infectious agents…" nor is a non-communicable disease transmissible to others, so a disease such as a stroke, cardiac arrest, kidney disease, cancer, or diabetes would all be categorized as a non-communicable disease and all can result in disability and/or death. Communicable disease, as defined by Merriam-webster.com is: "… an infectious disease transmissible (as from person to person) by direct contact with an affected individual or the individual's discharges or by indirect means," of which examples of this would be: Ebola, flu, hepatitis, measles, tuberculosis, pneumonia, infectious diarrhea, and malaria. As reported by Wikipedia.com, non-communicable diseases: "In 2012, they caused 68% of all deaths," whereas a century ago, the majority of deaths would have been via communicable diseases, for the lack of material wealth, and the ignorance of good medical science, meant that factors that today can be readily controlled such as hygiene and water, left unaided, created the conditions of contagion and pandemics that ran through communities, periodically.
The fact that the majority of deaths in the Western world are now via non-communicable diseases indicates that significant progress has been made in the controlling of communicable diseases, so thatnever have so many people, lived so long, yet, in America, life expectancy rather than continuing to improve, has recently stagnated. This would reflect a couple of very important things, which is first and foremost that non-communicable diseases are typically more susceptible to people that consistently over long periods of time make bad life style decisions in regards to what they eat, the drugs that they take, smoking, drinking alcohol, exercise, and their body weight, which abused long enough wears the body out, consequently they suffer for it by developing non-communicating disease which is both debilitating as well as life threatening. Additionally, whereas non-communicable disease used to be looked upon as a rich man's burden, for the rich often had relatively little fear of dying from communicable diseases related to poor hygiene or the lack of access to clean water, non-communicable disease nowadays adversely affects more poor people than the rich, signifying that poor people are more susceptible to both communicable as well as non-communicable disease than rich people.
Our knowledge of communicable diseases has permitted the Western world, to quite successfully, overcome communicable disease to such an extent that this, above all, is the reason that life spans have been extended so much for westerners over the last one hundred years, yet, the very fact, that in aggregate that this extension is now stymied, indicates clearly that the next hurdle to overcome in order to not only increase life span but also to increase the quality of life, is to make it public policy to improve significantly upon our knowledge of how to prevent, mitigate, and counteract the leading causes of death by non-communicable diseases. Yet, it would appear, for the rich, that this knowledge is known and thereby applied, whereas for the poor it is apparently not known and/or misapplied for as reported by mit.edu, "Over roughly the last 15 years, life expectancy increased by 2.34 years for men and 2.91 years for women who are among the top 5 percent of income earners in America, but by just 0.32 and 0.04 years for men and women in the bottom 5 percent of the income tables," which demonstrates an absolutely staggering difference in healthy living between rich and poor.
This means, that not only do the rich have all the material advantages in the first place, but they clearly have all the advantages of living longer and more healthful lives, so for the rich, they really do get to have their cake and eat it, whereas the huddled masses are left with just the crumbs and aborted dreams.