Kevin Flanagan 12/5/11 SOCI 1105 Application Paper Health and Social Stratification

Cause of Death: Inequality This is not exactly something you would hear on a television crime drama, yet social stratification, the hierarchal ranking of people in a society who have different access to valued resources such as property, prestige, power, and status, can be the stealthy predecessor to poor health and eventually mortality in the United States. According to the economist and historian Alejandro Reuss, the uneducated and those with meager finances in this country are at an increased risk of death and illness. His article Cause of Death: Inequality, identifies how the social stratification of income, class and even race can be a significant factor in determining poor health and death rates. Men with less than 12 years of school have three times the likelihood of dying due to injury and are twice as likely to die of communicable diseases as their counterparts with just one year of education in the United States. Certain diseases such as cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, homicide, and AIDS are more prevalent in African Americans. The lower someone is in the ranks of society, the more likely they are to have more health issues as well as a shorter lifespan. While access to health care often leads in headlines decrying inadequate services for the poor, it is not the only contributor to the disparity of overall health and death rates. A significant amount of people in this country are without health care and while this is a major problem, there are other major issues that accelerate health problems associated with poor education and people living under the poverty line. These include environmental dangers, contagious diseases, and just an overall unhealthy lifestyle of smoking, lack of exercise and poor diet.

If a person has a poor education, they may not have been encouraged to live a healthy lifestyle and their basic knowledge of wholesome life patterns may be limited. This individual may lack a firm understanding of modern medicine, making it difficult to request, receive, and understand medical care. Poor education and poverty can be related to one another. Without a complete and decent education, the probability a person may not succeed financially increases, which in turn dictates how money gets spent. When money is tight in a household, first priorities include paying utilities, rent, and buying food. This leaves little disposable income to pay for medical insurance, doctor bills or prescriptions. One aspect of this subject that may be relatively unknown is that greater income inequality, statistically speaking, goes hand in hand with poorer health. The author of the article I read details a 1996 study published in the American Journal of Public Health, indicating the bigger the gap in income distribution there is in an area, the lower the life expectancies are for everyone regardless of income. When people living in metropolitan areas of the United States share similar lower income, mortality rates are lower compared to people living in areas with a higher median income as well as those that have a much greater difference in income. Excluding the health issues that may result from differing incomes and education, the life expectancy for African Americans tend to suffer due to high blood pressure. African Americans who feel threatened by racism can suffer from larger and longer lasting increases in blood pressure compared to when experiencing other situations. Racism causes stress which contributes significantly to high blood pressure. When thinking about a professional working in an extremely fast paced environment, it would be apparent that stress is a significant issue for them. However, a person working in a blue collar job, may manifest more physically taxing stress that directly correlates to significant health issues. It seems that compared to white collar workers performing at a quicker tempo, people who work at lower level

positions are at a higher risk factor for heart disease because they experience much more hostility in their work. While many people associate inequality exclusively with racism, social inequality can have devastating consequences to both daily health and increased death rates. By identifying the different social and economic realities facing the uneducated, the poor and even those of different skin colors and nationalities, there appear to be significant injustices that have definitively lead to both illness and death.