Poverty affects the health of individuals in that it leads to limited access to income, making the poor socially isolated, experience a lot of stress and have few educational opportunities. In return, this causes poor health, which increases risk factors for diseases. The health outcome depends on environmental factors and health behaviors that are directly affected by poverty. In U.S 2020, the poverty rate was 10.5 percent, a decrease of 1.3 percent from the previous year.
A median household earning was $68,703, which marked an increase of 6.8 percent from the prior year. The supplemental poverty measure rate in 2020 was 11.7%, a decrease of 1% compared to 2019 (Traoré, 2021). The vulnerable populations affected by poverty include the economically disadvantaged, the racial and ethnic minorities, not insured, low-income children, those infected by a chronic health condition like mental illness, and the rural residents where the vulnerability is due to race, sex, and ethnicity.
In addressing poverty, the following measures have been taken: increasing employment, raising America’s pay, promoting high-quality childcare and early education, and finishing mass incarceration, among others (Abbas et al., 2021). 1990 marked the beginning of the Health People initiative with an aim of decreasing the death rate by increasing lifespan among adults. Since then, many progressive achievements have been recorded in the past four decades where healthy equity, quality of life and the creation of a social and physical environment encouraging good health for everyone have been achieved. Health people, 2030 is the current initiative with a focus on social determinants of health and health literacy and well-being.
References
Traoré, O. (2021). The relationship between health poverty and income poverty in the American States: evidence from index correlations. SN Business & Economics, 1(10), 1-19.
Abbas, K., Xie, X., Xu, D., & Butt, K. M. (2021). Assessing an empirical relationship between energy poverty and domestic health issues: A multidimensional approach. Energy, 221, 119774.