The majority of the people who have not experienced poverty do not understand economic inequality is about much more than just a person’s net worth.
In the United States, the city where the poor live can affect the length of their life. The richest American men live 15 years longer than the poorest 1 percent, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.
While there are many factors that contribute to the decreased longevity of the poor, geography shouldn’t be one of them. The reason geography affects life expectancy is due to the availability of preventative health care in poor neighborhoods and the local government’s budget for social spending.
Where the availability of preventative health care is greater and the governments have higher social spending for low-income residents, the life expectancy gap is smaller between the poor and the rich.
Cities with high preventative health care ability include New York, Los Angeles and Birmingham, Alabama.
On the other hand, cities such as Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Detroit do not have preventive health care access or social spending levels that can combat decreased longevity for the poor.
Increased social spending that focuses on educating poor Americans about healthier habits and provides health care clinic access in low-income neighborhoods does help the poor live longer. However, Angus Deaton, a Princeton economist, cleverly highlights two other factors in the decreased longevity of the poor: labor and education.
In an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Deaton states, “poor health threatens income.” In other words, the poor who do not have access to affordable health care, preventative or otherwise, live with lifelong injuries, diseases and disabilities. The health of the poor affects their ability to obtain and maintain a job, let alone a physically demanding job. The health of the poor threatens their ability to labor, which threatens their ability to earn income, which in turn further threatens their health and life expectancy.
In regards to education, Deaton makes two salient points. First, there is “reverse causality from health to income throughout the life course” and secondly, “the effects of parental incomes on child health and child education, which in turn have profound effects on those children’s health and income in adulthood.”
Basically, Deaton concludes income determines health throughout the lifetime of the poor and the effects of poor childhood education and health contribute to the decreased life expectancy of the poor.
It is an act of violence to let the poor in America die younger because the U.S. can’t get it together when it comes to public health access and proper education. We, as a country, are literally stealing years of the lives of the poor from them by denying them adequate education and health care through cost prohibition.
It is hard to specifically say how the cycle of poverty can be broken and how this country can begin to bring the life expectancy of the poor up the life expectancy of the rich. For now, more research needs to be conducted on the effects of education and ability to labor in relation to income and life expectancy so we can get on the right track.
