Class and Health
Income also had a significant impact on health as those with higher incomes had better access to health care facilities, higher life expectancy, lower infant mortality rate and increased health consciousness. While the United States lacks socialized medicine similar to that found in many other post-industrialized developed nations across Europe and Asia, 85% of the U.S. population were insured in 2005. Yet, discrepancies seem to remain beyond the difference between insured and uninsured. In 2006, Harvard researchers divided the U.S. into "eight Americas."
Life expectancy ranges from 84.9 years for Asian Americans who had an average per capita income of $21,566, to 71.1 years for Urban African Americans with an average per capita income of a $14,800.
Furthermore, like other post-industrial nations, the United States saw increased health consciousness among persons of higher social status. Persons of higher status are less likely to smoke, more likely to exercise regularly and be more conscious of their diet. Additionally, poor Americans are more likely to consume lower quality, processed foods. One can therefore conclude that low socio-economic status contributes to a person's likelihood of being obese.
Read more about this topic: Social Class In The United States
Famous quotes containing the words class and/or health:
“During the long ages of class rule, which are just beginning to cease, only one form of sovereignty has been assigned to all men—that, namely, over all women. Upon these feeble and inferior companions all men were permitted to avenge the indignities they suffered from so many men to whom they were forced to submit.”
—Mary Putnam Jacobi (1842–1906)
“Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)