Research Shows Poverty Is 4th Leading Cause of Death in US
"Poverty should be considered a major risk factor for death in the U.S.," argues
a new analysis.
By Jake JohnsonApril 19, 2023:
Information
Clearing House -- "Common
Dreams " -- Research published
this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association estimated
that poverty was linked to at least 183,000 deaths in the United States in 2019
among people aged 15 or older, making inadequate income the nation's
fourth-leading mortality driver that year behind heart disease, cancer, and
smoking.
“Poverty kills as much as dementia, accidents, stroke, Alzheimer's, and
diabetes," said David Brady, a professor of public policy at the University of
California, Riverside and the lead author of the
new analysis.
"Poverty silently killed 10 times as many people as all the homicides in
2019," Brady continued. "And yet, homicide, firearms, and suicide get vastly
more attention."
Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign,
wrote Wednesday that the research underlines the importance of connecting
"extremists' inaction" on gun violence to "other forms of policy murder."
The new analysis, co-authored by Ulrich Kohler of the University of Potsdam
in Germany and Hui Zheng of Ohio State University, stressed that the U.S.
"perennially has a far higher poverty rate than peer-rich democracies," which
"presents an enormous challenge to population health given that considerable
research demonstrates that being in poverty is bad for one's health."
Poverty, which the study defined as less than half the
median U.S. income, was "associated with greater mortality than many far
more visible causes in 2019—10 times as many deaths as homicide, 4.7 times as
many deaths as firearms, 3.9 times as many deaths as suicide, and 2.6 times as
many deaths as drug overdose."
The researchers argued their results indicate
that "poverty should be considered a major risk
factor for death in the U.S.," which has seen
life expectancy decline
since 2015—and
fall sharply amid the coronavirus pandemic.
"Because the U.S. consistently has high
poverty rates, these estimates can contribute to
understanding why the U.S. has comparatively
lower life expectancy," the researchers wrote.
"Because certain ethnic and racial minority
groups are far more likely to be in poverty, our
estimates can improve understanding of ethnic
and racial inequalities in life expectancy."
"The mortality associated with poverty is
also associated with enormous economic costs,"
they continued. "Therefore, benefit-cost
calculations of poverty-reducing social policies
should incorporate the benefits of lower
mortality. Moreover, poverty likely aggravated
the mortality impact of Covid-19, which occurred
after our analyses ended in 2019. Therefore, one
limitation of this study is that our estimates
may be conservative about the number of deaths
associated with poverty."
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.
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."
However, many of those poverty-reducing aid
programs, including the enhanced Child Tax
Credit that sharply slashed poverty among kids
in the U.S., have since
lapsed or been
terminated, threatening to
reverse any recent progress.
Brady said in a statement that if the U.S.
had less poverty, "there'd be a lot better
health and well-being, people could work more,
and they could be more productive."
"All of those," he added, "are benefits of
investing in people through social policies."
Jake Johnson is a staff writer for Common
Dreams.
Views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
Reader financed- No
Advertising - No Government Grants -
No Algorithm - This
Is Independent
