http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/search/label/Health%20care --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Economic inequality is correlated with status differentials, with declining civic participation, and with lack of control for those at the bottom of hierarchies. Such adverse social environments create high levels of stress, anxiety, and insecurity as well as feelings of shame and inferiority. And these, in turn, cause higher rates of serious illness and death, including death as a result of violent crime.
Unequal societies, in other words, will remain unhealthy societies - and also unhappy societies no matter how wealthy they become. Their advocates those who see no reason whatever to curb ever-widening income differentials - have a lot of explaining to do.
Michael Prowse recommends... Unhealthy Societies: The Afflictions of inequality by Richard G. Wilkinson (Routledge £19.99/$30).
Mortality: The Social Environment, Crime and Violence by Richard G. Wilkinson A Ichiro Kawachi and Bruce P. Kennedy, Sociology of Health and Illness Vol. 20, No.5 1998.
Mind the Gap: Hierarchies, Health and Human Evolution by Richard G. Wilkinson (Weidenfeld £7.99/Yale $9.95).
Psychosocial and Material Pathways in the Relation between income and Health by Michael Marmot and Richard G. Wilkinson, British Medical Journal, May 2001.
Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and its Causes by James Gilligan (Putnam £9.95/$12)