Michael Moore’s movie “Sicko” increased America’s awareness of the nation’s paradoxical health crisis. The United States spends more than any nation on health care and insurance but has poorer health than many developed countries and even some developing countries.
While Moore and most politicians see universal health insurance as the answer, LSA Sociology Professor James House says solving the nation’s health crisis will require going beyond health care to understand how environmental, socioeconomic and psychosocial factors impact health.
He will discuss how these factors create health disparities at the Angus Campbell Collegiate Professorship in Sociology and Survey Research Inaugural Lecture at 4:10 p.m. April 9 in Rackham Amphitheatre.
“Social and economic policy is also health policy and may be more important in determining levels of health than medical care and insurance,” says House, who also is a professor of survey research. “Living conditions, exposure to toxins, levels of stress, social relationships, psychological dispositions, all of those things predict changes in health and mortality.
“The CEO of the hospital has a much different life than the single mother,” he adds. “If you’re living on food stamps you can’t shop at Whole Foods. You are what you eat, smoke and breathe. What your level of stress is in your life, that’s your level of health.”
Because these factors are socially patterned in ways that create growing socioeconomic and racial-ethnic disparities, improving the nation’s health means reducing these disparities, House says. Beyond a question of social justice, improving conditions that impact health also is sound economic policy, with the cost of health care approaching 20 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.
“We’ve got to reduce people’s demand for health care by improving the social and psychological conditions of people’s lives,” he says. “When we let the minimum wage deteriorate, allow inflation to reduce the value of food stamps and permit the foreclosure crisis to drive people out of their homes, we’re ruining people’s health.”
