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Socioeconomic factors involved in chronic illness

Posted in Behavior, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Cognition, Empathy, tagged chronic illness, fractured society, life stress, mental illness, poverty, violence on November 25, 2015| Leave a Comment »

Socioeconomic factors involved in chronic illness

Larry H. Bernstein, MD, FCAP, Curator

LPBI

I have discussed a number of features of the health care system that are available to individuals and are becoming integrated over the last decade to a much greater extent than at the end of the last century.
Part of this has come because of an emergent view of health care markets and the patient base as a customer patient base. Related to this view is the emergence over a quarter of a century of greater consolidation of heath care providers. The first significant attempt to rationalize healthcare payments was with the development of diagnostic related groups by studies and proposals at Yale University School of Management under Robert Fetter. The first implementation was in New Jersey, prematurely supported by the Healthcare Financing Administration. As healthcare financing is usually predicated on HCFA, the insurance agencies, which includes negotiated for-profit entities follow suit. However, it takes a large patient base to support any insurance provider, and with the not-for profit providers negotiating with large for-profit organizations, there is a tension and a balance that has to come with such a plan. The existing system doesn’t support a fully nationalized system as exists elsewhere, and a two tiered system is almost inevitable. In addition, our society, built by two centuries of immigration, and having a model system from the Kaiser Project in building the San Francisco bridge, that also influence IBM, employment-based insurance had a good start. Government provision had to wait, with real success in the mid-twentieth century.

I have pointed out that the healthcare system has been in a remodeling process for the last quarter of a century aligned very much with business interests and the workforce. Even retirement insurance has been a worker innovation. However, what is the underlying situation that arises from this arrangement.
The power of labor-unions has been eroded, which erodes an element of leverage.

At the beginning of the industrial revolution in England there was a seminal study that showed that the workers developed stress related illness that was not seen at the management level. In the US we have had streams of immigration and seemingly boundless innovation that has contributed to an impressive economic image of a country. However, the story is also bimodal. There is a strong cultural factor and family structure factor in both upward mobility and in resilience of the individual under stress. This has been evident from observing the emergence of a former slavery descendent negro population and suppression of this people for a half century after the civil war, and more recently from migrations from Mexico, South America, and Cuba. We have had a selective migration of educated people from India and Asia, being that they were of a more mobile class of achievers. America, the home of the brave has been limited in representation.

What are the effects of this class disequilibrium? As the country has growth and as companies have moved offshore for cheap labor, the power of labor declined, and the benefits of labor have been pushed down. This resulted in a decline of the middle class, and levels of poverty and over the poverty line pushing families into considerable tension. This is characterized by high divorce rates, and there are single mothers working two shifts, or both parents trying to balance the time available.

The problem here is like a compound fractured society. The clustered neighborhoods are not just black, as a generation moved out and up, and property values dropped in once desirable neighborhoods. The existence of a close community of common culture is workable as it is held together by common lineage. However, the fissures occur where the parents have no time for family, and the parents have no time to play with or read to their children. This problem can be carried over from one generation to the next by failure in child development to gain basic living and society skills. What we don’t happen to recognize is that as this multiplies, compounded by the highest level of incarceration in the Western world, there is uncontrolled violence, hatred, suicide, anger, and shortened lifespan. This has a huge cost, and the cost weighs on the individuals affected and the communities they live in. The cost includes the health burden. Moreover, even though we have a large service sector with sports and exercise therapy, it may not be included in healthcare benefits, but is provided as add on to unreimbursed costs.