This is a bit confusing. Everybody dies, poor or not. Poor people are not over-represented in death statistics.
A meaningful measure would have been "being poor means dying X years earlier, give or take Y, compared to median wealth".
Poverty Is the 4th Leading Cause of Death in the US, Research Shows
21–30 of 84 posts
Re: Poverty Is the 4th Leading Cause of Death in the US, Research Shows
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happens to the typical person’s healthcare costs when some people who consume extremely expensive treatments” just don’t pay”? What is the equilibrium here?
Most likely nothing, medical expenses are no where near at-cost like they should be. Even assuming that they go up, you can't expect anyone not to "consume" medical care. I'm not going to deny someone treatment because it might cost me a few more pennies or dollars, that would be comically villainous. The equilibrium would be treating medical care as a public good just like highways or firefighting, but insurance com…
If they were at cost, nobody would invest in healthcare and you'd die undiagnosed of something as trivial as pneumonia.
Also firefighters will charge you for a callout.
Re: Poverty Is the 4th Leading Cause of Death in the US, Research Shows
#23This paper is not on sci-hub. :(
The abstract sounds correlational.
The quotes from the researchers at the top of the article say explicitly that it's casual. The later parts of the article describing the paper go back to sounding correlational.
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I would expect there to be enough shared causes to make it rather a pain to untangle.
Re: Poverty Is the 4th Leading Cause of Death in the US, Research Shows
#24> Poverty, which the study defines as less than half the median U.S. income
Is this the same definition of poverty used by the federal government for all other poverty-related statistics? If not, it sure is interesting that the study would come up with it's own definition. Unfortunately the links study appears to be behind a Jama pay wall, I'd love to see how they came up with that and whether it was defined before the study was conducted.
> The onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 brought about a sharp increase in U.S. poverty as millions of people got sick, were thrown out of work, and lost health insurance.
Also interesting that the issues here would still be categorized as caused by poverty rather than the pandemic and our pandemic response. Poverty contributes plenty of issues that can lead to an early death, but if the study is attempting to roll those up and label the proximla cause of death as poverty how is the increase in poverty and related deaths not rolled up as an effect of the pandemic itself?
Re: Poverty Is the 4th Leading Cause of Death in the US, Research Shows
#25"Poverty, which the study defined as less than half the median U.S. income" I wonder how much of this can be attributed to medical bankruptcy. If you cannot afford insurance, get injured, can't afford treatment...pretty straightforward doom loop to an early grave
>I wonder how much of this can be attributed to medical bankruptcy. Only 4% of US bankruptcies are because of medical bills https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2018/0... >. A tipoff that [insert large percentage here] of bankruptcies aren't actually because of medical costs is that only 6% of bankruptcies by those without health insurance are because of that cause. The biggest cause of bankruptcies…
That 91% figure comes with a big caveat: it's the percentage of people who reported they had health insurance at any point during the year. So if you had coverage on January 1st but lost coverage on January 2nd and never resumed coverage for the year - you're still considered part of that 91%.
There's also the challenge that not all coverage is equal here. The ACA (and certain follow-up legislation) set some baseline, and states may also have their own minimum coverage criteria, but it can vary wildly. The ACA's biggest impact was mandating coverage for common-but-critical things like childbirth etc.
Source: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2022/demo/p60-27...
Re: Poverty Is the 4th Leading Cause of Death in the US, Research Shows
#26Outrageous, runaway medical costs are the cause. Not poverty.
Seems really hard to peg any one factor as "the cause". How did you land on runaway medical costs?
Re: Poverty Is the 4th Leading Cause of Death in the US, Research Shows
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most likely nothing, medical expenses are no where near at-cost like they should be. Even assuming that they go up, you can't expect anyone not to "consume" medical care. I'm not going to deny someone treatment because it might cost me a few more pennies or dollars, that would be comically villainous. The equilibrium would be treating medical care as a public good just like highways or firefighting, but insurance com…
If they were at cost, nobody would invest in healthcare and you'd die undiagnosed of something as trivial as pneumonia. Also firefighters will charge you for a callout.
Doesn’t that depend on the city you live in?
Re: Poverty Is the 4th Leading Cause of Death in the US, Research Shows
#28"Poverty, which the study defined as less than half the median U.S. income" I wonder how much of this can be attributed to medical bankruptcy. If you cannot afford insurance, get injured, can't afford treatment...pretty straightforward doom loop to an early grave
>I wonder how much of this can be attributed to medical bankruptcy. Only 4% of US bankruptcies are because of medical bills https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2018/0... >. A tipoff that [insert large percentage here] of bankruptcies aren't actually because of medical costs is that only 6% of bankruptcies by those without health insurance are because of that cause. The biggest cause of bankruptcies…
Obama are became Trumpcare became Bidencare. Obama may have put his name on that shit sandwich of a plan, but both parties have been in charge since and no one has explained how the bastardized middle ground of not quite socialized Healthcare is the right answer, or proposed a proper fix to the broken attempt at a crawl/walk/run strategy.
Re: Poverty Is the 4th Leading Cause of Death in the US, Research Shows
#29Are the first 3 causes dying, aging, and poor health? As soon as you start allowing abstract concepts that contribute to a person's death to count as the cause of a person's death, this stops being an especially meaningful statistic. I'd much rather see a calculation of how many years of life are lost, an actually meaningful metric.
> I'd much rather see a calculation of how many years of life are lost, an actually meaningful metric.
How do you calculate the number of years lost? Do you subtract their age from the national age expectancy or do you run a prediction model to extrapolate the age each individual would have lived to given what data is available for them?
Re: Poverty Is the 4th Leading Cause of Death in the US, Research Shows
#30What's next? Being human is the #1 cause of death?