Income Inequality In Health

The main question that I will be addressing is ‘How does income inequality impact the health status of a community/individual?’. In the article ‘Effect of Income Inequality on Health Status in a Selection of Middle and Low Income Countries’ written by Elnaz Hajebi and Javad Razmi, it is argued that income inequality reduces the health status in the poorest areas. That is, population in areas with lower socioeconomic status tend to have a much lower health status then areas that are developed. There are many secondary questions that could be analyzed regarding this topic since there are many external variables and scenarios that could change the final outcome. Another question that is crucial to cover is ‘Are there other factors that may affect …show more content…
Although the United States and Canada are considered to be very developed countries, this study has a lot of policy relevance because the two countries being studied are very close in terms of geographic location but not necessarily close in terms of health. Since 1990, the life expectancy gap has increased by almost two times in the United States(Mcgrail et al., 2009, pg.1856). Accordingly, many policies can be implemented to decrease the life expectancy gap and raise overall average age in the country. The data used in this study came from the joint Canada-US survey of health and to gather this data, a 1time phone survey was conducted in both the United States and Canada between the years of 2002 and 2003(Mcgrail et al., 2009, pg.1856). The Joint Canada-US survey of health took samples from every province in Canada and from four different regions in the Unite States(Mcgrail et al., 2009, pg.1856). The main population that was being surveyed were individuals that are 18 years of age or older and lived in a private residence that included a telephone landline. The response rate of the total population of 8688 people was 50% in the United States and 66% in Canada(Mcgrail et al., 2009, pg.1856). To measure the outcome variable of health for this study, the Human Utilities Index was used because it is a very good indicator of health and has been used before in studies of population health(Mcgrail et al., 2009, pg.1856). This index ranges from -0.03 and 1 an is determined by a test that asks the individuals a series of questions that covers many fields of human life(Mcgrail et al., 2009, pg.1856). The study also used the Gini coefficient for general health measurement of the population in question. One of the main results the study found is that the Unites states had a lower average health then Canada did. The United States had a Human Utility Index score of 0.881 while the score obtained from the