Relationship Between Health and Wealth and Their Influences

Health and Wealth
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Health and Wealth
Introduction
Health is the perfect physical, mental, and emotional state of any human being or other living organisms, which when affected, altered, or changed in any way deems the person ill and in need of medical care. Wealth refers to an abundance of something, especially valuable possessions and money. Unfortunately, in today’s world, attaining optimum care, which should be universal, varies depending on one’s wealth or financial status. This variation creates a big difference in the type of medical care that someone from a well-off family gets compared to someone from a poor background. Additionally, most high-end hospitals that provide high-quality medical care have rich people as their patients, whereas people from poor backgrounds go to public hospitals and other free clinics where medical care is faced with several challenges such as insufficient medical practitioners, insufficient drugs/medicines, and inadequate as well poor quality of medical equipment. In most cases, low-income earners end up incurring more costs while also suffering and eventually dying from treatable conditions. Poor people happen to have it rough compared to the wealthy. For example it is expected that the poor will die early compared to the rich. With difficulties in accessing healthcare services rising due to the increased cost of healthcare, the revelation above comes as no surprise. Therefore, provided herein is a discussion of the relationship between wealth and health and how the former influences the latter.
Mental and physical health is greatly influenced by financial health (Purnell, 2015, pp. 163-171). This is why stress caused by monetary problems can lead to more health problems for more impoverished families. In an early 2015 survey by the American Psychological Association, it was noted that money was on top of the list of things that people are most worried about. In the survey discussed above, money was ranked even higher than work-related issues, family and health. This is a major problem because, today, most aspects of a healthy lifestyle depend on one’s financial status. In his article titled, “Financial Health is Public health”, Purnell is quoted saying, “Despite stacks of studies showing that financial health and physical and mental health are connected and that the conditions in which we live also affect how well and how long we can expect to live, the description above of how individual effort interacts with environment and resources to produce life outcomes remains a tough sell in the current political climate.” ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"39JvHrQX","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Purnell, 2015, para. 12)","plainCitation":"(Purnell, 2015, para. 12)","noteIndex":0},"citationItems":[{"id":227,"uris":["http://zotero.org/users/local/WvZUWaY4/items/6YUE6V7B"],"uri":["http://zotero.org/users/local/WvZUWaY4/items/6YUE6V7B"],"itemData":{"id":227,"type":"chapter","container-title":"What It's Worth: Strengthening the Financial Future of Families, Communities and the Nation","edition":"1","publisher":"Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco","title":"Financial Health is Public Health","author":[{"family":"Purnell","given":"Jason Q."}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2015"]]}},"locator":"12","label":"paragraph"}],"schema":"https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json"} (Purnell, 2015, para. 12). The implication of this quote is that where people fall in the economic or wealth index today directly impacts their health. The political climate today is one that inclines towards the rich. The richer a person is, the higher the voice they have. This approach continues to render thousands of families poor and unable to afford healthcare. In the U.S., there has not been a unanimous cry for universal healthcare, mainly because the poor do not have that much of a voice in how things are run in the country. Despite being a wealthy country, the U.S. still has the worst disparity compared to its rich counterparts. As things stand, the poor are a forgotten lot, and this will remain the case as long as healthcare is perceived a privilege than a need.
In another quote from the same article, Purnell says, “Not surprisingly, adults with lower incomes experience financial stress more acutely, and those who experience high levels of stress-related to their finances are more likely to cope by smoking, eating, drinking alcohol, and watching television in excess, all of which increase their risk for chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease.” (Purnell, 2015, para. 1). It can be said in other words that, lower-income households are more likely to suffer acute stress due to the financial difficulties they are experiencing. Adults who are meant to provide for their families but cannot do so comfortably may resort to drinking alcohol and smoking, which increases their risks to diseases such as diabetes ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"NkafleVK","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Purnell, 2015)","plainCitation":"(Purnell, 2015)","noteIndex":0},"citationItems":[{"id":227,"uris":["http://zotero.org/users/local/WvZUWaY4/items/6YUE6V7B"],"uri":["http://zotero.org/users/local/WvZUWaY4/items/6YUE6V7B"],"itemData":{"id":227,"type":"chapter","container-title":"What It's Worth: Strengthening the Financial Future of Families, Communities and the Nation","edition":"1","publisher":"Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco","title":"Financial Health is Public Health","author":[{"family":"Purnell","given":"Jason Q."}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2015"]]}}}],"schema":"https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json"} (Purnell, 2015).
I chose this quote as it shows the challenges faced by lower-income households. An adult must provide for his/her family. In a situation where this is a challenge, adults may feel lost and decide to find unhealthy ways of coping with poverty. Habits such as drinking, and smoking pose a significant health risk to adults irrespective of their status. Other than their addictive nature, these unhealthy habits cause diabetes, heart disease, lung failure, and kidney problems.
The last quote from the first key point comes from the Scientific American journal article titled, “The Health-Wealth Gap”, by Sapolsky, who says, “Basically, more unequal societies have worse quality of life. Across countries and among U.S. states, more inequality, independent of absolute levels of income, predicts higher rates of crime, including homicide, and higher incarceration rates. Add in higher rates of kids being bullied at schools, more teen pregnancies, and lower literacy. There are more psychiatric problems, alcoholism and drug abuse, lower levels of happiness and less social mobility.” (Sapolsky, 2018, p. 64). When this is paraphrased, it means that the quality of life is directly correlated with unequal societies on wealth. Quality of lif...