A. Income has an impact on health status, as do other factors associated with the lives of low income people. The health care system is less effective for poor people a. Our health insurance coverage system is incomplete, especially affecting the working poor. Chronic diseases is the major source of life threatening illness today, and people without health insurance cannot get care for these problems so the conditions worsen, interact with other diseases, and create more drastic health problems. For example, post-mortem studies have shown that heart disease is under way by the time people reach 20 but acute care treatment does not recognize it as a treatable disease until someone has angina or a heart attack.
Poor people experience more environmental risk a.
If they work, their jobs are more dangerous and expose them to more hazardous substances than higher occupational status individuals. Marmot explores the Marxist hypothesis that the experience of work for working class people is inherently less satisfying, and hence more stressful than for middle class people. The result of SES measurement is that each person gets a number, slightly diffrent in value, representing the mixture of the three variables or factors. When we report the variation in socioeconomic status for the population, what we find is a continuous distribution of status rankings, from very low to very high, with no breaks along the way. The is a social class gradient.