In Sickness & in Wealth
Income and wealth inequalities have huge health impacts. What are the health advantages of being rich as compared to being poor? You’ll live longer and your quality of life will be better. With deep pockets you get lots of vacation time, live in capacious apartments or houses, you have nannies to take care of the kids, cooks and house cleaners. And you eat well. Organic arugula, shitake mushrooms, fresh-squeezed carrot juice. You have access to the best medical care money can buy. You get annual checkups. Whereas if you are indigent you wait and wait and hope the lump on your breast will disappear and the pain in your tooth will just go away. Being well off frees you from the mental stress of worrying about where your next meal is coming from and where you will sleep tonight.
Speaker

Stephen Bezruchka
Dr. Stephen Bezruchka is on the faculty of the Department of Health Systems and Population Health at the University of Washington. He worked for many years as an emergency physician in Seattle. He worked in Nepal for more than a decade where he helped set up a community health project a week’s walk from the road. He also established a remote district hospital for training Nepali doctors whom he supervised. He is the author of Inequality Kills Us All: COVID-19’s Health Lessons for the World.
Forest –
I was particularly interested in Bezruchka’s talk because I’m having my students consider the issue of healthcare. I typically have them watch Sicko, but since my aim is to get my students to consider a socialist alternative to capitalism, I want to broaden the scope of our inquiry to include health as a whole, not just healthcare. Obviously, that’s precisely what Bezruchka does in his talk, so I’m going to share some of his points with my class. Wilkinson and Picket do some of this work to in the “Physical Health and Life Expectancy” chapter of their book The Spirit Level, a book in which they highlight correlations between all sorts of social morbidities and inequality, as you may already know.
Please keep on bringing high-quality talks to listeners. That work is much appreciated.
Jeff Diver –
Building strong children rather than caring for broken adults has many implications, none of which can be dealt with by the American love affair with laissez-faire capitalism. Actually, we do not have to look very far back in American history to find the key to unlock better, healthier lives for all of us. Dr.. Bezruchka points out that statisics show our individual efforts to achieve long life (eat healthy, exercise, etc.) are ineffective in extending useful lives beyond the limits set by our society’s overall health profile. I would say Americans suffer from sickly individualism.When we improve the health of everyone by cooperative effort (that means higher taxes, folks!) our individual fates will improve. Until then, the health outlook for Americans in comparison to other wealthy nations will remain bleak.Fortunately, you don’t have to take my word for this. Listen to Dr. Bezruchka!
Heidi Carter –
This fine lecture focuses on what are the social conditions that best promote health and long life. A wide broad view is clearly presented and supported by observations and data from around the world and depths of history. Scary how some cultural norms and political policies, especially in the US, promote poor health, unhappiness and short life. Lots of good examples of what works and what doesn’t and why. Thanks so much for the work and good intention, Dr. Bezruchka. You clarrified a big seemingly gigantic complexity down to its dynamic essentials, even to a blueprint for action. Heidi