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Money = quality health care = longer life
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<p>By Alvin Powell, Harvard Staff Writer</p>
<p>Fourth in a series on what Harvard scholars are doing to identify and understand inequality, in seeking solutions to one of America&rsquo;s most vexing problems.</p>
<p>If you want to get an idea of the gap between the world&rsquo;s sickest and healthiest people, don&rsquo;t fly to a faraway land. Just look around the United States.</p>
<p>Health inequality is part of American life, so deeply entangled with other social problems &mdash; disparities in income, education, housing, race, gender, and even geography &mdash; that analysts have trouble saying which factors are cause and which are effect. The confusing result, they say, is a massive chicken-and-egg puzzle, its solution reaching beyond just health care. Because of that, everyday realities often determine whether people live in health or infirmity, to a ripe old age or early death.</p>
<p>&ldquo;There are huge inequalities in this country that often get overlooked &hellip; If you want to observe the problems of poverty and inequality, you don&rsquo;t need to travel all the way to Malawi. You can go to a rural house in America,&rdquo; said Ichiro Kawachi, John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Social Epidemiology and chair of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health&rsquo;s Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. &ldquo;If you&rsquo;re born a black man in, let&rsquo;s say, New Orleans Parish, your average life expectancy is worse than the male average of countries that are much poorer than America.&rdquo;</p>
<p><a href="http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/02/money-quality-health-care-longer-life/?utm_source=twitter&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_campaign=hu-twitter-general">MORE&gt;&gt;</a></p>