By Cliff Montgomery – May 15th, 2016
The modern world’s trend toward greater human health and longevity has, in recent years, all but ceased for poorly-educated white Americans. In fact, the death rate for middle-aged women in that group has been on the rise.
On Wednesday, BBC News published statements from a number of health and socio-economic experts about these disturbing issues.
The experts revealed that two of the greatest problems are America’s socio-economic class structure and the medical industry’s extreme use of opioid-based prescription pain-killers for poor white people.
Today, we’ll consider the problem of America’s class structure – an especially important matter, since Americans are taught almost from birth not to see their country’s class system.
On Wednesday, we’ll delve into the reasons behind the abundance of opioid prescriptions for middle-aged, poorly educated white women.
To clarify some of the ways in which America’s socio-economic class system harms the poor – and especially poor women – consider the statement given by Laudy Aron, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, a Washington D.C.-based think tank. Aron has done much of her work in health and mortality research.
“Raj Chetty and colleagues came out with a very big study in the Journal of the American Medical Association in April”, Aron told BBC News, adding that the Chetty research looked “at the association between income and life expectancy in the US between 2001 and 2014.
“They showed rich women outlive poor women by ten years,” Aron flatly declared.
“They also showed that these gaps between the rich and poor in terms of survival have been growing over time,” she added.
“So over the period that they looked at, the richest Americans gained about three years of life expectancy, while the poorest had no increase.
Aron pointed out that “one of the most interesting features of this study” has been the revelation regarding “the importance of place in terms of life expectancy and survival.
“It really shows that even at the same level of low income, you’re better off in a more affluent, better-resourced community,” stated Aron.
In other words, the Chetty study helps to underline the importance of such local matters as “the quality of the schools, the financial base, [and] the tax base on which so many of our shared resources depend.”
While “it’s one thing to raise your family in poverty, and your children in poverty,” Aron pointed out that the Chetty study clearly shows “it’s another thing to raise them when 40% of your neighbors are also living in poverty.”
“My colleagues and I looked into the data and really started to dig into what’s happening among white women,” declared Aron. They discovered “a spike in women of both child-bearing and child-rearing years” who apparently are dying of “drug-related overdoses, cirrhosis of the liver, suicide, and similar types of causes.”
Though a fair number of these deaths “are associated with health behaviors,” Aron cautions “that even a lot of these health behaviors and the mortality causes that underpin them occur in a context.
“So I think it’s important that we understand the bigger environment in which these are occurring,” stated Aron.
“It really is a constellation of factors having to do with social and economic well-being,” she added.
