Health And Wealth

Health and Wealth In this article Jacobs and Morone bring up very interesting point about our health in relation to or jobs and healthcare. They start off by highlighting the ranks in life expectancy, mortality and overall health rates that the Unites States holds in comparison to the rest of the world. They don’t forget to mention that sadly we come in “last or nearly so in almost every way we measure health”. They introduce his topic when he states, “great differences in wealth match up to-…- terrible differences in health”. They make a claim that our health problems lie on three main causes: “inequality, poverty, and the way we organize our health-care system.” They touch on the income gap in the labor force while comparing the higher paid workers to the low paid workers. They bring up a famous study that measured health based on income. The study concluded that the higher one is up the ladder the less likely they are to experience fatal heart attacks therefore suggesting that the “CEO’s were less likely to die than workers closer to the bottom”. What shocked me was the fact that this research was applied in other countries by other researchers and the turnout was the same. They tie in health issues by stating that the struggle to make ends meet makes one experience “stress and physiological harm” that in turn results in “depression, hypertension, other illnesses, and high mortality rates”. They suggest that this constant battle of trying to get ahead eats away “neighborly feelings, frays our communities, and lowers trust in institutions like churches and governments”. They don’t deny that these are also factors but that most other countries protect its citizens from episodes of economic insecurities and the loss of jobs which is the contrary in the United States. In the United States one is left to their own devices.
Moreover, according to the authors, health is also affected by poverty. They claim that the effects of poverty bring on hunger and