Poverty and health care essay

Download this Research Proposal in word format. As a result, millions of Americans remain unable to bear the heavy financial toll of medical expenses. Indeed, the problem of a lack of insurance for many is related to the problem of the cost of healthcare. So confirms the article by Consumer Reports CRwhich finds that "health-insurance premiums have grown faster than inflation or workers' earnings over the past decade, in parallel with the equally rapid rise in overall health costs.

Our mission demands that we confront head-on inequalities in access to high-quality health care and other factors that contribute to health and longevity, especially for populations that are most vulnerable.

As we define vulnerable children and families, poverty weighs in no matter what criteria we use. Health status trends have paralleled the patterns of poverty over the years.

Who is affected, where they live, and what their backstory is all contribute to explaining changes in health as well as wealth. Although in the United States we can claim many advances and improvements, in comparison with the rest of the developed world we are not in good health.

According to the most recent United Nations data, the United States ranks 36th in life expectancy among industrialized nations. For decades, policymakers, scholars, public health workers, community development leaders, advocates, and others have worked to address the problems of poverty or poor health.

To effectively reduce poverty and poor health, however, we now know that we must address both, as well as the contributing factors they share. We have learned that factors that are integral to poverty, such as insufficient education, inadequate housing, racism, and food insecurity, are also indicators of poor health.

Although it is essential, increasing access to health care is not sufficient to improve health.

Poverty and Health - The Family Medicine Perspective (Position Paper)

There is more to health than health care. In fact, health care plays a surprisingly small role among the factors that contribute to premature death, just 10 percent; in contrast, social circumstances 15 percentenvironmental exposures, genetic predisposition, and personal behavior combined contribute to 90 percent of preventable deaths.

In fact, those in the highest income group can expect to live at least six and a half years longer than those living in poverty. A few explanations exist that are both evidence based and logical: And the higher the family income, the healthier their children are likely to be.

The cross-generational ties to poverty are also ties to poorer health. Here are a few examples: Babies born to mothers who did not finish high school are nearly twice as likely to die before their first birthdays as babies born to college graduates.

Children in poor families are about seven times as likely to be in poor or fair health as children in the highest income families. Children whose parents did not finish high school are more than six times as likely to be in poor or fair health as children of parents who earned a college degree.

We charged the commissioners to craft actionable recommendations for change.

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The commission, led by economists Alice Rivlin and Mark McClellan and comprising leading experts from a broad range of sectors, came back with 10 recommendations that focused largely on communities rather than health or disease prevention.

In order to improve health in this country, the health sector must work closely with those who plan and build communities, especially the community development and finance organizations that work in low-income neighborhoods to build child care centers, schools, grocery stores, community health clinics, and affordable housing.

From the health perspective, our interest is less about the buildings and more about what happens in them. Are the schools providing healthful food and eliminating empty-calorie snacks?

Is there daily physical activity during and after school? Are grocery stores providing and promoting healthful foods? Is affordable housing situated in proximity to safe places to play and be physically active?

Is the neighborhood walkable, with well-lighted sidewalks that lead to public transportation, jobs, and services? Health care providers also are well aware of this need. As a physician, I generally cannot discuss health with a patient who lives in poverty without talking about the areas where community development works: I can attest that it is important for us to ensure that health and community development work together.

These findings send a clear message: Consider, for example, a woman with diabetes. In addition to the health care she receives, she also will be counseled to modify her diet to include more fruit and vegetables, or to exercise more.

But if this woman is poor, there is no accessible supermarket, and her neighborhood is unsafe, she will be much less likely to follow these recommendations. Her diabetes will likely not be abated, her health will deteriorate faster, hospitalizations will be required sooner and more often, and complications will come earlier.

All of these are affected by factors outside the medical care system. But we know that to do so, we must expand the scope of our vision and work. We understand that neither improving health nor reducing poverty is the endgame. Our vision is to create opportunities for all Americans to lead long, healthy, and productive lives.

At the foundation, this outlook has led to an evolution in how we work: First, the focus of grant making is evolving: A recent example of this involves our County Health Rankings,7 which rank the health of every county in the United States, in part on the basis of social factors.Poverty is the lack of basic human needs, such as food, nutrition, education, health care, and shelter.

It is mainly caused because of fewer available incomes compared with others in the society. Poverty is not faced by a single person, it runs in a society.

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Improving America’s health requires leadership and action from every sector, public, private, and nonprofit, including people who work in public health and health care, education, transportation, community planning, business, and other areas. The objective for this paper is to explain what I have learned from our class discussion and our readings of Chapter 30 of our text, Economics Today.

Society can intervene to increase host resistance and mitigate poverty’s negative effects on individual and population health by expanding access to health care, providing infrastructure that.

Poverty in Africa Essay example; Essay on Poverty and Health in Somalia and Africa Words | 6 Pages.

Africa has many issues going on, but the one issue in specific that I am going to talk about is the poverty and health of Somalia, and the whole of Africa. Somalia is the poorest country in the world and they have a very weak health system.

Health Expenditure Poverty Essay poverty Definition  Poverty and Health Analyze whether poverty is a cause of poor health in a community or whether poor health is a cause of poverty.

severe disease issues and put the strain onto the health care system.