Unnatural Causes: Is inequality Making us Sick?

[Hannah Bell]

http://www.unnaturalcauses.org/about_the_series.php

DID YOU KNOW: The Japanese smoke more, the Germans drink more, the French eat more fat, yet they all live longer, on average, than Americans do.

It often appears that we Americans are obsessed with health. Media outlets trumpet the latest gene and drug discoveries...We spend more than twice what the average rich country spends per person on medical care. Yet we have among the worst disease outcomes of any industrialized nation - and the greatest health inequities. It's not just the poor who are sick. Even the middle classes die, on average, almost three years sooner than the rich...

Our international health status has fallen radically in the last few decades...Healthy behaviors...are all important. But evidence suggests they miss the most vital factor of all: how the social circumstances in which we are born, live and work can get under our skin and disrupt our biology as surely as germs and viruses.

We produced UNNATURAL CAUSES to draw attention to the root causes of health and illness...Economic and racial inequality are not abstract concepts but hospitalize and kill even more people than cigarettes. The wages and benefits we're paid, the neighborhoods we live in, the schools we attend, our access to resources and even our tax policies are health issues every bit as critical as diet, smoking and exercise.

The unequal distribution of these social conditions - and their health consequences - are not natural or inevitable. They are the result of choices that we as a community, as states, and as a nation have made, and can make differently.

[bkkyosemite]

1. I'm ill over it.

[glowing]

2. Many of these countries will not allow GMO foods and crazy things like

HFCS and Aspertame in their food products.. Aspertame, another Rummy fortune maker he rammed down the American's throats.

[Hannah Bell]

3. The United States spends more on health care than any other

industrial nation, yet it has the highest infant death rates and the lowest
life expectancy. How can this be?

Americans suffer the worst health statistics in the industrialized
world because they live in the most unequal society in the industrialized world.

Inequality is generated by capitalism. Capital is created when
employers pay workers less than the value of the goods and services
they produce. The resulting profit, or capital, is used to extract more
capital. As this process repeats over time, capital accumulates at the
top of society, inequality grows, and the health of the entire population
suffers, not just those on the bottom.3

Inequality Kills

A study of 282 metropolitan areas in the U.S. found that the
greater the difference in income, the more the death rate rose for all
income levels, not just for the poor. Researchers calculated that if income
inequality could be reduced to the lowest level found in the United
States, it would save as many lives as would be saved by eradicating
heart disease or preventing all deaths from lung cancer, diabetes,
2motor vehicle crashes, HIV infection, suicide and homicide
combined.

http://susanrosenthal.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/class-health-and-health-care1.pdf

[Hannah Bell]

5. Power = Health

A study of the highly-stratified British civil service found that health deteriorated as social status fell.

This decline in health could not be explained by smoking, exercise or body weight.7 Income is not the
factor, because professionals who earn less than non-professionals still enjoy better health.8

The answer lay in the surprising finding that those near the top of the power structure had worse health than those at the top, even though their life-styles were essentially the same.7 The only
difference that could account for this is social power. People with more control over their lives enjoy better health.

Bosses live the longest, healthiest lives because they have the most power. As power diminishes, stress rises and health deteriorates. This relationship between social status and health has been found in every nation studied, including the United States.9

A 2008 study found widening differences in health between income levels in America. (Income is often used to measure social status.) The nation’s poorest adults were nearly five times more likely
to be in “poor or fair” health than the richest, and at every income level the wealthier group was healthier than the next lower one. This trend was seen in all racial groups.10

http://susanrosenthal.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/class-health-and-health-care1.pdf

[Hannah Bell]

7. Solidarity is the Best Medicine

It makes sense that inequality would make people sick. Human survival has always depended on the cooperation that flows from strong social bonds. People who pull together enjoy better health and
live longer.20

Human beings cannot be healthy in a world that generates inequality at every level. The unequal relationship between bosses and workers is maintained by divide-and-rule policies that generate many more inequalities based on sex, skin color, religion, nationality, etc. From birth to death, society ranks people on a vertical scale, with those higher up being treated as more worthy than those lower down. These divisions rupture social bonds and generate sickness throughout the population.

Universal access to medical care would reduce some of this inequality. However, even the best medical system cannot eliminate the health-damaging effects of poverty, war, social discrimination,
unsafe work, bad housing, poor schools, and being denied the right to make decisions that affect our lives. To end these miseries, we must eliminate class divisions and all the other inequalities that follow.

Solidarity is the best medicine for inequality.

http://susanrosenthal.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/class-health-and-health-care1.pdf

[Hannah Bell]

8. A License to Kill

A profit-driven society cannot prevent disease,1 because the primary source of disease is the drive for profit itself.

The assault on health begins at work. To raise productivity, maximum effort is demanded at all times. Add a lack of concern for worker health and safety and you have a recipe for disaster.

Every year, more than three million people (9,000 a day) are treated in U.S. hospital emergency departments for work-related injuries. Every year, between 5,000 and 6,000 die from these injuries,
almost twice as many as died in the 2001 World Trade Center bombing. Globally, an estimated 250 million people are injured and 330,000 are killed on the job every year.2

In 2002, nearly 300,000 new cases of work-related illness were reported in the U.S. This figure is very low, because many diseases, including cancer, are rarely reported as having a workplace origin.3

Instead of mandating safer work, the State virtually grants employers a license to kill. In 1970, Congress declared that causing the death of a worker by deliberately violating safety laws is a misdemeanor (not a felony) with a maximum sentence of six months in jail.

In 2003, a New York Times investigation revealed that workers were being “decapitated on assembly lines, shredded in machinery, burned beyond recognition, electrocuted, buried alive...”6 The Occupational Safety and Health Administration investigated only 57 percent of these horrible deaths and laid charges in only seven percent of the cases it investigated, despite finding that between 1982 and 2002, a total of 2,197 workers were killed on the job because their employers “willfully” violated safety laws...

http://susanrosenthal.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/class-health-and-health-care1.pdf

[Hannah Bell]

10. Rejecting the Devil’s Bargain

Capitalism forces us to choose between “healthy” profits and the health of flesh-and-blood people. To support profit, we must sacrifice human health. To support human health, we must sacrifice the capitalist system. The cost of compromise, curtailing our demands to what capitalism can manage, is an unacceptable loss of health and life.

We must reject this devil’s bargain. We must stop the misery that capitalism creates, not restrict ourselves to choosing the mosteffective way to manage this misery. That means fighting for universal
access to medical care, not as the end goal, but as the first step towards a fundamentally different society, one that will generate health instead of sickness.

Winning universal access to medical care will require mass mobilization. It took a revolution in France to scare Germany into establishing Europe’s first national medical plan in 1883. In Britain, the National Insurance Act of 1911 was rushed through Parliament during a strike wave. Canadian medicare was consolidated in 1972, the year of the Quebec General Strike.

[Hannah Bell]

11. International Health Workers for People Over Profit

WHO WE ARE

We welcome all who work in the mental and physical health industry, regardless of type of work, job description or location of work, employed and unemployed, students and retired, union and nonunion.
We welcome all nations, races, religions and political persuasions.

WHY INTERNATIONAL?

The forces that promote profit-at-any-price operate internationally. As medical industry giants expand across the globe, more health workers in different nations face similar conditions, sometimes even the same employer. To counter their divide-and-rule strategies, we must also
organize globally.

WHAT WE DO

We began organizing in October, 2007. We support each other’s efforts to meet human needs in a for-profit system. The network we are building today – across disciplines, nations, cultures – will be the foundation of tomorrow’s solidarity actions to demand better services for our patients, better working conditions for ourselves and a much healthier world for all.

JOIN US! www.healthworkersinternational.com


http://susanrosenthal.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/class-health-and-health-care1.pdf

[leftstreet]

12. Thanks for all these links

Bookmarking them.

Thanks for all your work!

:hi:

[Hannah Bell]

15. you're welcome, & kik.

[leftstreet]

4. K&R

[lutherj]

6. Kick & Rec. nt

[John Q. Citizen]

9. This is true.

[Trillo]

13. It makes sense, in a natural way

Perhaps it's nature's way of insuring a level of happiness among its creations. Those conditions that lead to increasing unhappiness in a social creature end up shortening life. Therefore, Nature is at least somewhat kind, but in an extremely long-term way, or Nature isn't entirely brutal. What a great thought!

"You will be assimilated, resistance is futile"

But then Hugh learned a valuable lesson, "Resistance is not futile".

Maybe our DofI should have prioritized some words slightly differently: liberty, happiness, and pursuit of life.

[Joe the Liberal]

14. k & r.......

:kick:

[SammyWinstonJack]

16. K & R

[foxfeet]

17. K&R

:kick:

[maryf]

18. K & R

Wow, thanks for this...

[.... callchet ....]

19. All the other countries have a common

national heritage. They can never achieve the aloneness that it is possible to achieve in this huge country. No matter where they are in their country they are always close to home and family. Lots of generations of family. This may aid in some sort of inner contentment that aids their longevity,

[Hannah Bell]

21. huh? immigration to many european countries on a par with the us.

there's no such universal common heritage.

but there's a bigger social safety net.

[.... callchet ....]

22. But don't the immigrants arrive in the other countries that is

relatively of the same national heritage. Mostly Italians in Italy, Spanish in Spain etc.

[Hannah Bell]

25. no. britain has large population of folks from its colonial empire,

many of whom have been there for generations; similarly france, germany, spain, portugal, italy, greece, turkey, etc.

in france, for example, i met algerians, moroccans, senegalese, vietnamese, whose parents had come as immigrants. 7% of france's population is arab. those countries were former colonies & still economically related. and britain, you know, has its own slave-holding, slave-trading history, in addition to having the most far-reaching colonial system in history.

scandanavia used to be relatively homogenous but now have sizeable arab/asian populations. 4% arab, & recently, a high proportion of immigrants from iraq.

russia, china, latin america - huge land masses, many cultural & ethnic groups, high historic mix.

arab countries i don't know much about, but i suspect its much the same. africa, similarly, wide cultural variety in native peoples plus long, long history of colonialism & immigration from overseas, missionaries, etc.

even japan, which cut itself off from the world for hundreds of years, has a long-standing korean "minority" who kept its separate identity through generations because of japans neighborhood registration system, as well as the indigenous ainu, & the caste-like burakumin. Plus small populations of folks who intermarried with white traders or were "christianized" by them.

You need to get out more! :>)

ps: when i lived in supposedly homogenous japan, i felt very strongly it had more variety than the us did in some ways, simply because it hadn't been so taken over by corporatism & tv at the time. more variation in local accents, building style, dress, for example, with older people still wearing traditional regional clothes, & traditional streetcart vendors selling things like baked sweet potatoes, complete with sing-song sales chants peculiar to the area. layered on top of that, the western admixture; american suits & business culture with japanese twist.

[.... callchet ....]

26. ! ! !

You have dispelled preconceived notions that I had all my life. I had attributed special traits and qualities to these other countries because I had always thought they had a stronger sense of nationalism. I thought they all shared a common sense of heritage. That they were all closely related. "THANKS FOR YOU TIME AND THE INFORMATION"

[Hannah Bell]

27. seriously? glad to be of help, then, & thank you for your civility.

[.... callchet ....]

30. Civility

I am just an observer of life soaking up information. I will make my judgmental statement on my death bed.

[.... callchet ....]

31. You might want to look at this post of mine

As per your UHC here is mine : http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=114x53079

[Hannah Bell]

32. checked it & posted, thanks. "i wish you'd die" is precisely the message

being delivered.

& people get the message, even if they're not always consciously aware of it.

[maryf]

20. Another kick for good health, physical and economic!!

[Horse with no Name]

23. It would seem that it just makes sense that the foods that are healthiest for you

fresh veggies, fruit would be cheaper than highly processed food that requires extensive packaging.
But this isn't the case. Poor people can't afford good, wholesome food.
You can usually buy 4 boxes of toxic mac and cheese for the same price you can buy 4 apples.
The apples are much more nutritious--but the kids tummies will be full from the mac and cheese.
This isn't by mistake, it is by design.

[Blue_Tires]

24. it has been shown that high stress levels can also have a big impact

[IMPERIUM V]

28. Maybe Americans should stop feeling sorry for themselves...

acting as if they're the world's #1 unsung victims, when in fact they are the world's #1 victimizers. They're constantly seeking out ways in which they've been ripped off or somehow mistreated. I'm sorry your supervisor can be a bit of a dick sometimes, that's no reason to support imperialist wars and tougher immigration laws and longer prison sentences.

[Hannah Bell]

29. & the relation between your comment & the op?