The Impact Of Health Inequality On Health

Health outcomes are a significant measurement of quality of life and social outcomes, without good health we do not have the capabilities to do what we want in life with Arteyma Sen’s capabilities way of thinking Without good health supporting this, the vast majority of the people would not be able to earn money and this would have a detrimental impact on society. This chapter will look at how inequality has a severe effect on health outcomes within a country. Considering and analysing research from Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level which has revolutionised the way social and health scientists look at the effect of inequality on health outcomes. In this chapter, this paper will focus on two key and widely utilised health

People who are in poverty cannot afford necessities such as proper nutrition which in turn causes poor health. Both Japan and the United Kingdom are above the $25,000 threshold in the Spirit Level. Throughout this threshold, infrastructure and disease prevention capability play a more important role. It is argued that after this threshold society has a greater impact, influences include diet, exercise and social capital. Therefore, both countries meet the criteria set by Wilkinson and Pickett to where absolute income plays a limited role in health outcomes. Looking at both countries’ life expectancy, Japan has a life expectancy of 84 years, in contrast to 81 years in the United Kingdom according to the WHO in 2012. In the last few decades, both countries have experienced increased life expectancies with both countries levelling out in the last few years. Scholar Karen Rowlingson observes that despite this increase in life expectancy in the United Kingdom, the inequality in health in the United Kingdom is a growing problem. This is a modern-day expansion of the Whitehall studies which showed substantial health inequalities in the UK. In the period 2002-05 according to government organisation Office for National Statistics (ONS), both men and women in professional jobs lived seven years longer than those in non-skilled manual jobs. Similar to GDP per capita, life expectancy is still a biased average in which

In contrast to the United Kingdom, Japan has only recently been considered a developed state, despite this Japan has made substantial progress in health, providing universal health care in a period where its GDP was less than half of the United Kingdom. Both countries now have a GDP per capita, which is almost identical as shown in the figure above. This allows this paper to omit GDP per capita as the factor which causes the divergence health of Japan from that of the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, Japan’s poverty figures are difficult to locate making the task of figuring out whether Japan’s health outcomes are due to income inequality more complicated due to the lack of concrete evidence. Traditionally, it had been assumed that Japan had one of the lowest poverty rates and low sense of income inequality. In recent years the perception of Japan’s equalitarian 90% middle-class society has been diminished by the publication of the Toshiaki Tachibanaki’s book ‘Confronting Income Inequality’. Tachibanaki argues that more recently we have seen the increase in both inequality and poverty within Japan. Thus, the perception of equality appears to have an influential factor on health outcomes. Despite this, a big factor in inequality is pre-tax inequality, thus whilst the United Kingdom appears to show a better income inequality than Japan in some inequality indicators