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Poverty Is the 4th Leading Cause of Death in the US, Research Shows
- hunglee2 3y ago"Poverty, which the study defined as less than half the median U.S. income" I wonder how much of this can be attributed to medical bankruptcy. If you cannot afford insurance, get injured, can't afford treatment...pretty straightforward doom loop to an early grave
- abudabi123 3y agoDemocracy, the poor can't afford
- TMWNN 3y ago>I wonder how much of this can be attributed to medical bankruptcy. Only 4% of US bankruptcies are because of medical bills <https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2018/03/26/the-truth-about-medical-bankruptcies/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2018/0...>. A tipoff that [insert large percentage here] of bankruptcies aren't actually because of medical costs is that only 6% of bankruptcies by those without health insurance are because of that cause. The biggest cause of bankruptcies is lack of income, which health insurance doesn't affect. 91% of Americans have medical insurance, whether through their employers, or government programs like Medicare/Medicaid. That's compared to 95-97% in other developed countries because there are always some people who fall through cracks, like (say) a Canadian who doesn't get a new provincial health care card after moving, or a German who neglects to buy into a new sickness fund after changing careers. The only such systems with actual 100% (or as close to it as possible) coverage is something like the UK NHS, which does not have a requirement to show a membership card (because, well, there isn't one) to receive treatment. There are things I'd certainly improve about the US system—decoupling primary healthcare coverage from employment, for one—but the way people online ~~lie~~ exaggerate it's not surprising that so many non-Americans believe that every American is one hangnail away from bankruptcy. PS - Obamacare did not greatly expand coverage. 85% of Americans had medical insurance pre-Obamacare.
- monetus 3y agoThe extremes are what people will talk about most, for sure; I lived that experience in a state where medicaid wasn't expanded and have trouble shutting up about it. Most everyone around me avoided that experience, almost everyone in my social circles.
- qgin 3y agoStates without medicaid expansion are very rough. Most people don't realize that ACA plans have a minimum income to qualify. Medicaid was supposed to take over below that income level. If you're in Florida or Texas and are an adult who isn't currently pregnant (or have a legally declared disability), and make less than 150% of the federal poverty limit, there is literally no insurance you can get except paying full retail price for a private plan (which would consume about 1/2 of your income in premiums and deductibles).
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoYou describe precicely my situation after being laid off last year $1600 a month for health insurance
- jacquesm 3y agoThat's absolutely indecent. Has this been solved by now? Are you managing? (email in profile if you want)
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoThanks. I'll email
- wang_li 3y agoThe details vary but if you don’t earn much you usually qualify for additional cost-sharing reductions which cuts the costs of insurance plans under the ACA substantially.
- refurb 3y agoConsidering 41 out of 50 states have expanded Medicaid to include people up to include adults up to 138% of federal poverty level, and Medicaid has very low out of pocket costs, I'd argue that the very poor actually have better medical insurance than middle class people in the US.
- 082349872349872 3y agoJFK on, inter alia, poverty (extended dance mix): http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/KF/0510/jfk/05_-_Sing_Along_With_JFK_-_The_Trumpet.mp3 http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/KF/0510/jfk/05_-_Sing_Along_With_J...
- nahnahg 3y ago[dead]
- graymatters 3y agoOutrageous, runaway medical costs are the cause. Not poverty.
- flagrant_taco 3y agoSeems really hard to peg any one factor as "the cause". How did you land on runaway medical costs?
- crumpusBaggins 3y agoi think its a bit strange to blame medical costs, such as expensive treatment X for serious disease/injury that didnt exist 30 years ago, as the cause of someones death, who would have been dead without that treatment. the money involved in healthcare does bring up some interesting thoughts. i remember hearing that the "war on poverty" didnt impact poverty rates because govt guidlines dont factor in gov't social services such as $ amount of medicaid recieved, food stamps, etc. so really the cause of death should include poverty + depending on X govt services, not either or
- Madmallard 3y agoI became disabled in 2018. I have accumulated 5 figures in debt already since even while being on Cobra and now Medicare. This is criminal.
- atdrummond 3y agoJust don’t pay it. I wish I had been told this instead of flushing thousands upon thousands down the toilet in a futile attempt to keep the balance at $0. The system is designed to be adversarial and your best tactic as a patient is to delay, delay, delay and fight every single bill. I have had seven operations for Crohns, a back surgery, and treatment for ongoing Leukaemia. I have lived in a half dozen different jurisdictions for health care and I’m only alive thanks to the excellence of the US medical system. Doesn’t make the financial side of it any less onerous, sadly.
- wskinner 3y agoWhat happens to the typical person’s healthcare costs when some people who consume extremely expensive treatments” just don’t pay”? What is the equilibrium here?
- flangola7 3y agoMost likely nothing, medical expenses are no where near at-cost like they should be. Even assuming that they go up, you can't expect anyone not to "consume" medical care. I'm not going to deny someone treatment because it might cost me a few more pennies or dollars, that would be comically villainous. The equilibrium would be treating medical care as a public good just like highways or firefighting, but insurance companies and hospital-owning equity firms actively expend resources to prevent that.
- jojobas 3y agoIf they were at cost, nobody would invest in healthcare and you'd die undiagnosed of something as trivial as pneumonia. Also firefighters will charge you for a callout.
- ghoogl 3y ago[dead]
- awaythrow483 3y ago[flagged]
- Clubber 3y agoI don't see how they made the connection to poverty and mortality. I'm sure there is one, but the fact the article didn't point out the specific cause and effect is disappointing. The onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 brought about a sharp increase in U.S. poverty as millions of people got sick, were thrown out of work, and lost health insurance. Are they trying to say that people died during Covid because an increase in poverty and that poverty was the reason for the increase in deaths? What about Covid? But federal aid initiatives enacted in response to the public health and economic crisis—from stimulus checks to boosted unemployment benefits to enhanced nutrition assistance—ultimately led to a significant drop in poverty, further bolstering the case that "poverty is a policy choice." Poverty is certainly policy choice to a degree.
- dmix 3y ago> Poverty is certainly policy choice to a degree. Housing is probably the biggest cause of poverty directly influenced by (existing) policy. Zoning alone could result in plenty of reduction in inequality among other stuff like reducing NIMBY power. I'm curious if now that we have a mountain of half empty offices which don't freely compete with residential development if the implications of zoning is even worse than before. Previously the primary argument was low-density suburban zoning acts in conflict to the free market (https://www.amazon.com/Zoned-Out-Jonathan-Levine/dp/1933115157/ https://www.amazon.com/Zoned-Out-Jonathan-Levine/dp/19331151...) which besides giant skyscrapers was the only openly tolerated housing development for the past n* decades.
- Clubber 3y agoIt would be nice to have a social safety net in regards to rent/mortgage. I'm not sure how to implement it though. The eviction moratorium played a big part in lack of homelessness during covid. The only problem is the government made property owners financially responsible for it. I'm not sure if they ever got compensated.
- dmix 3y agoMeh we need supply not bandaid'ing high rent costs. The housing crisis goes well beyond the homeless (which get the bulk of the attention, if not adequate solutions), which only ever results in half-baked subsidies or forcing skyscrapers to add a small amount of low income options. While the drumbeat of ever increasing housing costs continues. Housing needs radical reform. There isn't a lack of capital to build this stuff. We don't need government to put up a bunch of money. The second they make building possible, in the places/ways the market demands, there will be a flood of new development which will directly benefit the low end of the market by not making tiny houses cost $1M and low-density suburban housing the only alternative.
- grammarnazzzi 3y agoLiving is the 1st Leading Cause of Death in the US Research published this week estimated that life was linked to at least 100% of the deaths in the United States in 2019 among people aged 0 or older, making living the nation's number one leading mortality driver that year.
- tayistay 3y ago3rd iteration of that joke on this thread.
- Max-Limelihood 3y agoAre the first 3 causes dying, aging, and poor health? As soon as you start allowing abstract concepts that contribute to a person's death to count as the cause of a person's death, this stops being an especially meaningful statistic. I'd much rather see a calculation of how many years of life are lost, an actually meaningful metric.
- jrflowers 3y ago> I'd much rather see a calculation of how many years of life are lost, an actually meaningful metric. How do you calculate the number of years lost? Do you subtract their age from the national age expectancy or do you run a prediction model to extrapolate the age each individual would have lived to given what data is available for them?
- AbrahamParangi 3y agoThose are both better ideas than the cited study!
- jrflowers 3y ago[dead]
- tayistay 3y ago> I'd much rather see a calculation of how many years of life are lost, an actually meaningful metric. It's only a google search away! Looks like the rich live about 10 years longer than the poor in the US. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4866586/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4866586/
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> Looks like the rich live about 10 years longer than the poor At the extremes. The “gap in life expectancy between the richest 1% and poorest 1% of individuals was 14.6 years (95% CI, 14.4 to 14.8 years) for men and 10.1 years (95% CI, 9.9 to 10.3 years) for women.” More troubling, between 2001 and 2014 “life expectancy increased by 2.34 years for men and 2.91 years for women in the top 5% of the income distribution, but increased by only 0.32 years for men and 0.04 years for women in the bottom 5%.” [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4866586/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4866586/
- jojobas 3y agoThis is a bit confusing. Everybody dies, poor or not. Poor people are not over-represented in death statistics. A meaningful measure would have been "being poor means dying X years earlier, give or take Y, compared to median wealth".
- tbrownaw 3y agoThis paper is not on sci-hub. :( The abstract sounds correlational. The quotes from the researchers at the top of the article say explicitly that it's casual. The later parts of the article describing the paper go back to sounding correlational. . I would expect there to be enough shared causes to make it rather a pain to untangle.
- flagrant_taco 3y ago> Poverty, which the study defines as less than half the median U.S. income Is this the same definition of poverty used by the federal government for all other poverty-related statistics? If not, it sure is interesting that the study would come up with it's own definition. Unfortunately the links study appears to be behind a Jama pay wall, I'd love to see how they came up with that and whether it was defined before the study was conducted. > The onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 brought about a sharp increase in U.S. poverty as millions of people got sick, were thrown out of work, and lost health insurance. Also interesting that the issues here would still be categorized as caused by poverty rather than the pandemic and our pandemic response. Poverty contributes plenty of issues that can lead to an early death, but if the study is attempting to roll those up and label the proximla cause of death as poverty how is the increase in poverty and related deaths not rolled up as an effect of the pandemic itself?
- bombcar 3y agoI can't read the firey letters, but it seems it's somewhere in here: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/01/19/2023-00885/annual-update-of-the-hhs-poverty-guidelines https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/01/19/2023-00... The "federal poverty guidelines" are kind of useless on their own - you need the percentage adjustments that various states apply to handle the incredible cost of living differences that exist.
- flagrant_taco 3y agoI can't say if it's in the paywalled study or just the article, but multiple stats and links used point back to government poverty data which would be using a different definition than the study. At a minimum that would be sloppy journalism, but in my opinion any researcher should see that coming and use the standard definition that the study is clearly attempting to compare against. It really doesn't seem to make sense to redefine such a loaded term even if the federal definition is tedious to work with.
- bombcar 3y ago
- refurb 3y agoWhat's next? Being human is the #1 cause of death?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- daniel_iversen 3y agoThere's probably lots of data everywhere but here is "Poverty rates in OECD countries as of 2021" to compare where the US sits against other countries: https://www.statista.com/statistics/233910/poverty-rates-in-oecd-countries/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/233910/poverty-rates-in-... They're probably using the ~6.85$ a day ("upper middle income poverty line") https://ourworldindata.org/poverty https://ourworldindata.org/poverty
- atdrummond 3y agoI’m very skeptical of this. I have been homeless in metro America and a huge number of the people I was homeless with (as well as their families) would be no healthier with an additional $10k, $20k, $30k etc., a year. Activists like to claim that “food deserts” are a supply side phenomena but I promise they exist due to a lack of demand for the food those in suburbs or luxury high-rises prefer. A larger budget just means the vast majority of these people will purchase Pizza Hut instead of Caseys/7-Eleven.
- salmonellaeater 3y agoThe study is paywalled but it looks like poverty is just correlated with death. The most likely explanation is that they have a common cause. In studies that can differentiate between environmental and genetic causes, longevity has some genetic influence but no or very little influence from poverty. For example, from [1]: > The heritability of longevity was estimated to be 0.26 for males and 0.23 for females. [...] There is no evidence for an impact of shared (family) environment. In this context, "shared family environment" encompasses everything in the environment that is shared between children in the same family, including income. Another study [2] shows that longevity has substantial genetic cause: > Half of the variation in susceptibility to mortality is genetic: findings from Swedish twin survival data Note that these two studies only include childhood poverty. What about adult poverty? From [3]: > While we find some evidence that permanent income shocks lead to poorer health behaviour, we find no evidence that it affects directly any health measures. Despite sizable shocks to income at the cohort level during our period of analysis, which can be empirically linked to changes in consumption expenditures, we fail to find any changes in (cohort) health, even if we allow those shocks to affect health with a lag. Note that this is health, not mortality, but they're related. It suggests that the stronger underlying cause is, in the paper's terms, "underlying factors" such as genetics, innate ability, or childhood poverty. Childhood poverty we already know from behavior genetics is not causal. There's other evidence out there along similar lines. If the new paper used a research design that could actually determine causality, or could at least rule out some ways in which a common cause would explain the data, it would be more interesting. [1] Herskind AM, McGue M, Holm NV, Sørensen TI, Harvald B, Vaupel JW. The heritability of human longevity: a population-based study of 2872 Danish twin pairs born 1870-1900. Hum Genet. 1996 Mar;97(3):319-23. doi: 10.1007/BF02185763. PMID: 8786073. [2] Yashin AI, Iachine IA, Harris JR. Half of the variation in susceptibility to mortality is genetic: findings from Swedish twin survival data. Behav Genet. 1999 Jan;29(1):11-9. doi: 10.1023/a:1021481620934. PMID: 10371754. [3] Adda, Jérôme, et al. “THE IMPACT OF INCOME SHOCKS ON HEALTH: EVIDENCE FROM COHORT DATA.” Journal of the European Economic Association, vol. 7, no. 6, 2009, pp. 1361–99. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40601206 http://www.jstor.org/stable/40601206. Accessed 22 May 2023.
- jxramos 3y agoPoverty is known to directly attack the liver particularly hard.
- Davidnkt89 3y agoThis is a shocking and sad statistic. Poverty is a preventable and curable condition, yet it kills millions of people every year. We need to address the root causes of poverty and inequality, such as unfair trade policies, corruption, exploitation, discrimination, etc. We also need to invest more in social protection, health care, education, and other basic services for the poor. Poverty is not inevitable. It is a choice.
- naveen99 3y agoI thought root cause of inequality is genetics and sexual reproduction.
- jscipione 3y ago[flagged]
- marketneutral 3y agofetus != human
- jscipione 3y agoPlease do not dehumanize your victims.
- marketneutral 3y agoplease do not defetusize my fetuses