Kate Sheppard notes that the gap in life expectancy between richer and poorer Americans is growing: "affluent and better-educated people are more likely to have quality health insurance and be able to take advantage of medical advances, and are less likely to smoke, live in dangerous neighborhoods, or eat unhealthy foods."
« Defense: It's for Democrats, Too! | Main | Unstoppable Momentum »
Mind the Gap
26 Mar 2008 02:13 pm
Comments (12)
A good example of this would be cancer treatment protocols. Wealthier, better educated people are the type to research, search for, and volunteer for therapies that involve research protocols.
The real question is what should the federal government do to change this situation. The alternatives is to eliminate such protocols, assign people to them, to continue with the current process.
Most of those factors are under the control of any individual regardless of income.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_system
There are interesting results coming out of schools where executive system reinforcement underlies all play and lessons. Folding that goal into public schools would go a long way to evolving them past glorified daycares.
You're telling me that this country's richest people can't buy more than a measly four additional years over the poorest people in this country?
That is depressing, enough so that even the fact that "life expectancy for the nation overall is on the rise" can't lift me out of the doldrums.
The correlation is actually much less strong than it might seem.
For example, there was a big study last year that showed the Latinos in California are among the poorest segment of the population and have the lowest rate of health care coverage and usage BUT are (surprisingly) nonetheless one of healthiest groups, with the lowest rate of illness and very high life expectancy.
I can't remember the exact details, but the study was by a very reputable research organization (PPIC?) and filtered out all the "obvious" factors that could be responsible for this. As a huge surprise it make the front pages of all the big CA papers and got some national coverage as well.
Basically, genetic and "lifestyle" factors are vastly more important than the conventional wisdom recognizes regarding health matters. I'd bet an awful lot this directly relates to Matt's post yesterday about healthcare in Mexico itself.
It is worth noting that wealth has a high correlation with how healthy people are during their years. Not much point in living longer if you're sick all the time.
How hard can it be to do a simple regression analysis? Which will reveal whether the differences corrolate with more money for meddical care, or with healthier life styles. And, if the life style differences are primarily responsible for improved longevity, then we can just legally mandate them, without spending more money on the medical establishment.
Latinos in America do well on a wide variety of health measures such as infant mortality, especially compared to blacks, even though they are similar in income.
Likewise, Asians in America have longer life expectancies than whites, even though both groups are similar in income and whites tend to have more wealth due to inheritances.
Predictably, Kate Sheppard misrepresents the Times piece. It mentions differences in health insurance only as a potential contributor to differences in life expectancy, and specifically states "researchers do not agree on an explanation for the widening gap" in life expectancy. Evidence from prior research, most notably the Rand Health Insurance Experiment, suggests that health insurance has only a small effect on health and mortality.
The evidence suggests that health insurance has little effect on health, and little effect on economic security. But "universal coverage" has now become such a sacred cow of the left that evidence no longer matters.
Re: For example, there was a big study last year that showed the Latinos in California are among the poorest segment of the population and have the lowest rate of health care coverage and usage BUT are (surprisingly) nonetheless one of healthiest groups
Maybe because they also tend to work in manual labor jobs that provide them with lots of physical exercize, something few jobs nowadays (even other low-paying jobs) provide.
Maybe because they also tend to work in manual labor jobs that provide them with lots of physical exercize, something few jobs nowadays (even other low-paying jobs) provide.
That might be a contributing factor, but I'm pretty sure the effect was much, much broader than that. For example, it also applied to female Hispanics, very few of whom do manual labor. Also, I think the pattern of sharp illness-difference included things like cancer, in which labor isn't a major factor. And Latino obesity *was* considerably worse than that in the Anglo population, which would seem to cut in the opposite direction.
My guess is that the difference is 70% genetic and 30% "lifestyle", but that's just a guess.
RKU,
Perhaps Mexicans have a genetic propensity to a stronger immune system than white or black Americans....Mexicans are, after all, descended in large part from that subset of Mesoamerican Indians who were tough enough to survive the onslaught of introduced diseases in the 16th century.
I would imagine that Latinos in the US also have more of a support structure through church and extended family, which tends to correlate with being generally healthy.
Mexicans and Central Americans also tend to be _smaller_ than most Americans, and smaller people tend to live a bit longer, if I recall corretcly.
Comments closed April 09, 2008.
| 
Heads in the Sand
If poor people contribute to society at their jobs and then die before collecting Social Security haven't they served their purpose?
Posted by steve duncan | March 26, 2008 2:23 PM