Most important determinant of health & life expectancy society-wide: the gap between rich & poor.

[Hannah Bell]

DANGERS OF HIERARCHY IN HEALTH

"To understand this factor, we need to recognize that the health of the US population is disgracefully poor compared with that of other rich countries. In the ranking of countries by life expectancy in 1997, the United States stood 25th, behind all the other rich countries and even a few poor ones.2 The country that has won the gold medal in this health Olympics every year since 1977, Japan, is also tied for the gold medal in the smoking Olympics. That is, the prevalence of smoking in Japan is tied with that in China as the highest in the world and 3 times that of the United States; yet, the Japanese do not die of smoking-related diseases to the extent that Americans do. Lung cancer mortality rates in Japan are one half to one third of those in the United States. How does Japan do it?

The answer is simple. The health of populations in rich countries is determined primarily not by the health care system - we have the most sophisticated and expensive, so it cannot be that-or by individual risk factors such as smoking, but rather, by the gap between the rich and the poor.

Many recent studies show that populations with a greater income hierarchy are less healthy, and specifically have shorter lives, than populations that are more equitable.3 These studies have looked at mortality and income distributions among countries, within countries such as each of the 50 US states, and within 282 standard metropolitan areas (US cities).

They have also looked at homicide rates, teen births, and specific diseases. Independent investigators have studied many different populations using different methods, and all agree: the strongest factor affecting health is the size of the gap between the rich and poor.

Other studies suggest physiologic mechanisms through which greater hierarchy results in worse health and posit that humans are by nature egalitarian.4,5,6 The analysis has the same level of validity as the relationship between smoking and lung cancer, using the criteria postulated in this country by the Surgeon General’s report in 1964. (The data and scientific analyses can be seen at http://depts.washington.edu/eqhlth.)"

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/28/059.html

[99th_Monkey]

1. I've been onto this for awhile .. James Lardner began putting this information out like 7 years ago.

and it's powerful stuff. It's always baffled me why a candidate such as Kucinich, Edwards or Obama hasn't
picked up on this and drilled it home to the American public. These findings are profound, in that Lardner
studied cancer and heart disease, finding that the incidents of these diseases were not even confined to
the poor and uninsured, but statistically was pretty even divided among income groups in the USA. Fascinating
stuff.

Lardner was actually a journalist by profession, but was so stunned by these findings he devoted several
years trying to get the word out on this, unfortunately without much to show for it in terms of politicians
picking up on it. :shrug:

Here's some links to Lardner's findings if you're interested.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0601-07.htm
http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?guid=%7B4299A2CD-D4D1-4B81-89A8-63B872F2E626%7D


He's one of two "co-editors" of Inequality.org here:
http://www.demos.org/inequality/news.cfm