I already posted one blog post this week, but reading Laura Unger's "Poverty Fuels Medical Crisis" made me so upset that I had to post again! Unger's descriptions of the poor or nonexistent healthcare that people receive in the Appalachian region of Kentucky ring true to me because I live in the Appalachian region of Georgia. While the depth of the problems in Kentucky is not as bad in Georgia, the horrible conditions that people that live below the poverty line exist in are universally awful. This article shows the prevalent and tragic problem of poor or nonexistent healthcare and I think Unger does a wonderful job of personalizing a problems that we often hear about on the news through numbers and statistics.
One particular problem that Unger noted was the inadequate healthcare available for the elderly, who often live with advanced diseases and lack basic medicine to control their medical problems. Perhaps the most shocking thing for me is to try to rationalize why someone would be suffering from a disease such as diabetes that is often highly treatable and for some types even avoidable. Unger does a wonderful job of showing how not only are most of the people in the article suffering from conditions that are treatable or manageable, but that they are also suffering from diseases that were treatable in the first place. Poverty causes or exacerbates all of these problems and this is the issue that Unger presents most strongly and that I agree causes so many of the problems in our society today.
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I found Laura Unger's article "Poverty Fuels Medical Crisis" to be a wake up call. While I had heard about the poverty present in the Appalachian regions of America, I did not realize how extreme the conditions were.
Poverty is like a never ending cycle; because families lack money, they are unable to prevent treatable or manageable diseases.
For instance, in my EDS class we were just assigned random family scenarios and instructed to prepare an annual budget of expenses (health care and basic necessities) for them. I was given a six person family that only makes $16,000 a year. I was presented with several problems. While I knew the family needed healthy food, the cheapest meal plan (the only one they could afford) was low quality fast food. This is a common problem in today's society. Poor families can only afford lower quality food and therefore, are more likely to suffer from preventable illnesses such as diabetes or obesity. In addition, while one of the children in the family was sick and needed perscription medicine every month, the family could only afford the most basic family health care package. Therefore, the family had to pay full price for all of the perscriptions.
But is this fair? So many people could avoid getting sick if they had basic health care and proper nutrition. Unfortunately, not everyone can afford the bare minimum.
Despite the trend in the US now for people to focus on international issues like AIDS and poverty, this article got me thinking about what deeply rooted problems we have facing us here in the US. Along with the youtube clip on poverty and healthcare in the US that someone chose for the clips assignment, I have become a lot more interested in what’s happening on “the opposite side of the tracks” so to speak.
After google searching for a while, I came across the wikipedia page for the “list of the poorest places in the US.” Here I found some interesting information:
“The poorest major locales in the United States all have high levels of ethnic or religious homogeneity, the second poorest, Cameron Park, Texas is the most ethnically homogeneous community in the United States.[1]. The fourth poorest, Kiryas Joel, New York, is 35th.[1]
Of the major locales with the lowest per capita income in the United States, seven are in Texas and all of these have at least a 97% Hispanic population. Two are in Arizona; Colorado City is a community in which members of the FLDS church live, while San Carlos is an Apache Indian Reservation.”
What I wanted to draw attention to here is the existence of socio-economic discrimination. Like the article on toxic racism, the socio-economics of the poor in the US are founded in ethnicity and religion. In order for anything to be done about this, Americans need to take the facts into account and develop programs specific to poor homogenous communities.
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