Rising Wealth Inequality Linked To Negative Health Impacts For Poor People

Rising income inequality in America isn't just an economic issue, it is a health issue, and a new study published in the journal Social Science & Medicine has the data to prove it.  According to the results of the new study, children who grew up during times of rising wealth inequality suffer from higher rates of illnesses like heart disease, diabetes, and chronic lung problems. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains why this is happening.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

A new study published in the journal Social Science and Medicine has revealed that income inequality, wealth inequality, rising wealth inequality, is in fact linked to adverse health effects in poor people, specifically low income children. Now here's what they did with this study. They looked at data, you know, national economic data. They looked at data from the national institutes of health. They looked at data from the CDC. They looked at, you know, different locations all throughout the country and what they found was that children growing up in times of increasing, you know, rising wealth inequality suffered more frequently as they got older of heart disease, diabetes, chronic lung infections, and all sorts of other socioeconomic related health problems.

And it all is tied directly, according to this study, to wealth inequality here in the United States, the worse the inequality gets the worse the health problems for poor people. And it's not, not a mystery as to why folks. When more wealth is concentrated at the top, there's less wealth down at the bottom. When there's less wealth down at the bottom, people aren't able to go to the doctors and treat conditions before they get worse. You know, you can't afford to go in there and monitor your blood sugar when you're prediabetic. So you don't even know that you're hitting that point. So eventually you hit full blown diabetes because you didn't have the test telling you to change your lifestyle. Change the way you do things before it becomes irreversible. Same thing with heart disease. You can't afford the screenings. You can't afford the blood work to test your cholesterol and all of those things.

So, boom, you end up with heart problems later in life because you couldn't afford to get tested. You can't afford an asthma inhaler. You can't afford the steroid inhaler to strengthen your lungs every day so you don't need a rescue inhaler. So you have more chronic lung problems as you grow older. Not to mention the fact, and this is, you know, geography based, most of these poorest people in the country happen to live in areas that are also heavily polluted, and that contributes to heart disease, to lung disease, to all kinds of endocrine disorders. Poor people get screwed in this country more than anybody else, because that's the way it's designed and that's what this study is telling us. We're killing people because they're poor. That's what's happening here in the United States and has been happening for decades. And this study is just the latest bit of proof that we have to show that this is happening.

And we have to reverse this. We have to reverse the income inequality. You know, Bernie Sanders has legislation out right now saying let's put a windfall tax on these massive corporations that are price gouging us. This is gonna slow down that rise in inequality. Let's push for higher minimum wages. Let's push for more unions because hey, guess what? In areas where unions are stronger, these health effects are lessened. So that's a interesting little tidbit there. Push for the unions, get people better pay, get people better benefits, push for universal healthcare and we could probably eradicate most of these differences in health quality between the poor and the wealthy. There's very real solutions out there. There's very real solutions that are relatively easy if we.