Increases in state and local spending could decrease mortality rates, researcher finds
Key points
- Income inequality and government social spending.
- In his study, Kim examined six leading causes of death in the U.S. in older adults: coronary heart disease, stroke, colon cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, and suicide.
- That income inequality affects health and mortality is not new.
- For Daniel Kim, associate professor in the Bouvé College of Health Sciences at Northeastern, such gaps can be a matter of life and death.
Income inequality and government social spending. These are hot-button issues in this year’s presidential primaries: the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, and the government’s role in closing the gap - or not.
For Daniel Kim, associate professor in the Bouvé College of Health Sciences at Northeastern, such gaps can be a matter of life and death.
In a paper published Tuesday in the journal Preventive Medicine, he examined the effects of U.S. state and local social spending - monies for welfare, education, and health - on mortality and drew not just a correlation, as the few earlier studies on the subject have done, but opened the door to inferring a cause-and-effect relationship between higher spending and longer lives for the more than 430,000 adults he assessed across the country.
The findings are sobering. “Each additional $250 spent per person per year on welfare predicted a 3 percentage point lower probability of their dying from any cause,” says Kim, an expert on the social and economic determinants of population health. “Welfare” encompasses several components, including state supplements to unemployment insurance, worker incentive programs, public assistance programs, and services for the elderly and disabled.
“While some presidential candidates have argued for more government social spending from a societal fairness point of view, my findings highlight the health benefits of welfare and education spending, in particular, and the harm that increasing or maintaining the gap between the rich and the poor can have on everyone’s health.”
An impact on all Americans
In his study, Kim examined six leading causes of death in the U.S. in older adults: coronary heart disease, stroke, colon cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, and suicide. Most affected by state and local government social spending was coronary heart disease, which kills more than 370,000 people annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
These reductions in mortality compare to the health benefits that we see in patients who receive successful treatment for high blood pressure or high cholesterol. - associate professor Daniel Kim
Kim found that each additional $250 spent per person per year on welfare reduced the chances of dying from heart disease by nearly 2 percentage points, and the same amount spent per person on education reduced the chances by almost 1 percentage point. In contrast, his analysis showed that the bigger the gap between the rich and the poor, the greater the chance a person had of dying.
"These reductions in mortality compare to the health benefits that we see in patients who receive successful treatment for high blood pressure or high cholesterol," says Kim. "Increasing social spending in these areas could impact all Americans, not just those who have access to clinical treatment."
Written and revised by
Andrey Nailor, M.D.
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