Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?
Thursdays at 10 p.m.
on WKAR-23
New Series Asks if Inequality Is Making Us Sick
What’s happening to our health? While we pour more and more money into drugs, dietary supplements and new medical technologies, a groundbreaking new documentary series crisscrosses the country investigating the findings that are shaking up conventional beliefs about what really makes us healthy — or sick. It turns out there’s much more to our health than health care, bad habits or unlucky genes. There’s a hidden killer in plain view: the social, economic and physical environments in which we are born, live and work profoundly affect our well-being and longevity.
Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? airs Thursdays, March 27-April 17, at 10 p.m.
The four-hour series coincides with the presidential election-year debates regarding the estimated 47 million Americans who lack health coverage. But Unnatural Causes goes further, asking what makes us ill in the first place. The series probes why one’s economic status, race and zip code are even more powerful predictors of health and life expectancy than smoking.
Each episode sheds light on the mounting evidence that work, wealth, neighborhood conditions and lack of access to power and resources can get under the skin and disrupt human biology as surely as germs and viruses. Experts and public health professionals emphasize that because these conditions are distributed unequally, so are patterns of chronic disease: e.g., heart disease, stroke, diabetes, asthma, even some cancers.
The series reveals a continuous health gradient tied to wealth. Life is longer and healthier at the top. At each step down the socioeconomic ladder — from the rich to the middle class to the poor — people tend to be sicker and die sooner. The least affluent die on average six-and-a-half years earlier than the rich. But even middle-income people die more than two years sooner than those at the top. Poorer smokers face higher mortality risks than rich smokers.
Evidence also suggests that racial discrimination imposes an additional health burden. With many diseases, African Americans, Native Americans and Pacific Islanders — at all income levels — fare worse on average than their white counterparts.
The series challenges our conventional approach to prevention, which has mostly been limited to encouraging healthy behaviors. But much of what affects our health lies outside an individual’s control and these too are health policies: better land use, transportation and business investment; ensuring that every neighborhood has access to supermarkets and healthy foods and not just fast food joints, liquor stores and mom-and-pops; creating safe streets and green space so people can walk, jog, bike and play; investing in our schools; paid vacations and family leave; and living-wage jobs with career ladders.
As a society, we’ve made changes that loosened the “wealth-health” linkage and improved the health of all before. Researchers attribute the 30-year increase in U.S. life expectancy over the 20th century not merely to new drugs and medical technologies but to social reforms such as the eight-hour workday, child labor laws, universal high school, civil rights laws, a progressive income tax, social security and the right to form unions that ensured that benefits from economic growth were more widely shared.
But Unnatural Causes makes the case that — despite the gains of the past — America has been moving in the wrong direction. Today, the top one percent of the population holds as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. Approximately 22 percent of our children live in poverty. And as inequality grows, our life expectancy ranking continues to drop — down from the top five in the 1950s, and lower than even a few years ago, as more and more countries surpass the U.S. with better health. Renowned health experts assert that we need not only universal health care to cure us when we’re sick, but also better and more equitable social and economic policies that can protect and promote our health in the first place. Social policy, they say, is health policy.
published: March 25, 2008
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