Jul 25, 2007
Rhymes With Commonwealth
A core principle of “commonhealth” holds that the health of individuals cannot be considered apart from the health of their surroundings, including family, workplace, community, and the environment. No body is an island. Individual health fluctuates relative to local inputs — we experience good or ill health in significant measure due to the good or ill health of the world we inhabit.
Michael Marmot, British epidemiologist and author of The Status Syndrome, has shown that individual health rises or falls with one’s high or low status in society. But this is not a simple matter of the wealthy having more money to buy better food and medical care:
Poverty doesn’t drive ill health … Inequality does. In rich countries, Marmot continues, most people have the basic resources necessary for life. But they do not have … control over their lives — the power to live as they want. The lower that people stand in the hierarchy, the less they have a sense of controlling their own destiny. Low control leads to chronic stress. High-status work, on the other hand, tends to be associated with greater control, more power, and better health. —New England Journal of Medicine, March 17, 2005
What does this mean for the United States, where the gap between the rich and the poor grows wider with every generation?
According to Harvard’s Ichiro Kawachi, the distribution of wealth in the United States has become an “important public health problem.” … [T]he links between socio-economic status and health are so compelling that public health researchers are beginning to suggest economic and political remedies.
Whenever progressives talk of better income distribution, they are accused of engaging in “class warfare.” Well, the overclass started it, and the bodies of the underclass are strewn across the American healthcare battlefield.
