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The vexing relationship between socioeconomic status and health
In a recent issue of this Journal, Politzer, Shmueli, and Avni estimate the economic costs of health disparities due to socioeconomic status (SES) in Israel (Politzer et al., Isr J Health Policy Res 8: 46, 2019). Using three measures of SES, the socioeconomic ranking of localities, individual income...
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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BioMed Central
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7690064/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33243273 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13584-020-00430-0 |
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author | Donahoe, J. Travis McGuire, Thomas G. |
author_facet | Donahoe, J. Travis McGuire, Thomas G. |
author_sort | Donahoe, J. Travis |
collection | PubMed |
description | In a recent issue of this Journal, Politzer, Shmueli, and Avni estimate the economic costs of health disparities due to socioeconomic status (SES) in Israel (Politzer et al., Isr J Health Policy Res 8: 46, 2019). Using three measures of SES, the socioeconomic ranking of localities, individual income, and individual education, Politzer and colleagues estimate welfare loss due to higher mortality, productivity loss due to poorer health, excess health care treatment costs, and excess disability payments for individuals with below median SES relative to those with above median SES. They find the economic costs of health disparities are substantial, adding up to between 1.1 and 3.1 billion USD annually—between 0.7 and 1.6% of Israel’s GDP. This paper is useful and informative. It is, to our knowledge, the first comprehensive quantification of the economic costs stemming from health disparities in Israel. In spite of many social policies designed to level economic opportunity and social welfare generally, by most measures, Israel is among the most unequal in the distribution of income among all OECD countries (Cornfeld and Danieli, Isr Econ Rev 12:51–95, 2015). Politzer and colleagues expose the magnitude and sources of health-related loss that Israel faces because of such inequality and shows how the costs of inequality are borne to some degree by all members of society. This short commentary discusses the complicated relationship between SES and health and puts the findings from Politzer and colleagues in the context of the international literature on the subject. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7690064 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-76900642020-11-27 The vexing relationship between socioeconomic status and health Donahoe, J. Travis McGuire, Thomas G. Isr J Health Policy Res Commentary In a recent issue of this Journal, Politzer, Shmueli, and Avni estimate the economic costs of health disparities due to socioeconomic status (SES) in Israel (Politzer et al., Isr J Health Policy Res 8: 46, 2019). Using three measures of SES, the socioeconomic ranking of localities, individual income, and individual education, Politzer and colleagues estimate welfare loss due to higher mortality, productivity loss due to poorer health, excess health care treatment costs, and excess disability payments for individuals with below median SES relative to those with above median SES. They find the economic costs of health disparities are substantial, adding up to between 1.1 and 3.1 billion USD annually—between 0.7 and 1.6% of Israel’s GDP. This paper is useful and informative. It is, to our knowledge, the first comprehensive quantification of the economic costs stemming from health disparities in Israel. In spite of many social policies designed to level economic opportunity and social welfare generally, by most measures, Israel is among the most unequal in the distribution of income among all OECD countries (Cornfeld and Danieli, Isr Econ Rev 12:51–95, 2015). Politzer and colleagues expose the magnitude and sources of health-related loss that Israel faces because of such inequality and shows how the costs of inequality are borne to some degree by all members of society. This short commentary discusses the complicated relationship between SES and health and puts the findings from Politzer and colleagues in the context of the international literature on the subject. BioMed Central 2020-11-26 /pmc/articles/PMC7690064/ /pubmed/33243273 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13584-020-00430-0 Text en © The Author(s) 2020 Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. |
spellingShingle | Commentary Donahoe, J. Travis McGuire, Thomas G. The vexing relationship between socioeconomic status and health |
title | The vexing relationship between socioeconomic status and health |
title_full | The vexing relationship between socioeconomic status and health |
title_fullStr | The vexing relationship between socioeconomic status and health |
title_full_unstemmed | The vexing relationship between socioeconomic status and health |
title_short | The vexing relationship between socioeconomic status and health |
title_sort | vexing relationship between socioeconomic status and health |
topic | Commentary |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7690064/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33243273 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13584-020-00430-0 |
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