8.3.1: Physical Health

 8.3.1: Physical Health 

If you want to get a sense of how social class affects health, take a ride on Washington’s Metro system. Start in the blighted Southeast section of downtown D.C. For every mile you travel to where the wealthy live in Montgomery County in Maryland, life expectancy rises about a year and a half. By the time you get off, you will find a twenty-year gap in life expectancy between the poor blacks where you started your trip and the rich whites where you ended it. (Cohen 2004) As you can see this from Figure 8.7, the principle is simple: As you go up the social-class ladder, health improves. As you go down the ladder, health worsens (Hoffmann et al. 2019). Age makes no difference. Infants born to the poor are more likely to die before their first birthday, and a larger percentage of poor people in their old age—whether 75 or 95—die each year than do the elderly who are wealthy. Figure 8.7 Physical Health, by Income: People Who Have Difficulty with Everyday Physical Activities The following interactive is not accessible to keyboard and screen reader users. What follows is an explanation of what appears on the screen. A horizontal bar graph presents physical health, by income, based on the percentage of people who have difficulty with everyday physical activities.The top-horizontal axis of the graph ranges from 0 to 25 percent in increments of 5 percent, with details of the graph as follows:Over 100,000 Dollars: 7.6 percent75,000 to 100,000 Dollars: 10.9 percent50,000 to 75,000 Dollars: 14.0 percent35,000 to 50,000 Dollars: 15.7 percentLess than 35,000 Dollars: 23.6 percent. How can social class have such dramatic effects? Although there are many reasons, here are three. First, social class opens and closes doors to medical care. People with good incomes or with good medical insurance are able to choose their doctors and pay for whatever treatment and medications are prescribed. The poor, in contrast, don’t have the money or insurance to afford this type of medical care. A second reason is lifestyle, which is shaped by social class. People in the lower classes are more likely to smoke, eat a lot of fats, be overweight, abuse drugs and alcohol, get less exercise, and practice unsafe sex (Wiltshire et al. 2019). This, to understate the matter, does not improve people’s health. There is a third reason, too. Life is hard on the poor. The persistent stresses they face—uncertainty of housing, employment, even basic safety—weaken their immune systems, causing their bodies to wear out faster (Porter 2019; Tribble and Kim 2019). For the rich, life is so much better. They have fewer problems and vastly more resources to deal with the ones they have. This gives them a sense of control over their lives, a source of both physical and mental health.