A person’s SES can affect many aspects of their life, especially their health. The socioeconomic status of a person can determine whether a person is able to access health insurance that will cover enough of the medical bills or whether they have access to decent medical care. A person who is in the lower SES may be employed but the company they work for does not offer health insurance and payments cost more than that person makes monthly which makes the person unable to afford health insurance. A person who is in the higher SES will most likely get their health insurance offered through their company with a discount and will have access to higher quality health care due to their income.
According to Medical Sociology by William C. Cockerham, “SES is a ‘fundamental cause’ of mortality. This is an important proposition because most researchers in the past viewed SES as a factor contributing to poor health and mortality, not as direct cause” (64). The research that was done states that to be a cause of illness and death, it must “1. Influence multiple diseases; 2. Affect these diseases through multiple pathways of risks; 3. Be reproduced over time; and 4. Involve access to resources that can be used to avoid risks or minimize the consequences of diseases if it occurs” (64). When living in the lower SES, there is less access to health care and prevention to disease which causes multiple other diseases or pathways to influence other diseases.
In the image below is a graph of education, which leads to income and job status. The graph compares the education level and job skill level to age of life expectancy of England and Wales. Although the women tended to out lived the men; the higher the education, job level, and income level the higher life expectancy.
Image courteous of UK Parliament ("2 health," 2009)
Why do you believe that people with higher SES will out-live the lower SES?
References
Cockerham, W. C. (2012). Medical sociology. (12 ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
2 health inequalities - extent, causes, and policies to tackle them . (2009, March 15). Retrieved from http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmhealth/286/28605.htm
Socioeconomic status. (2013). Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/topics/socioeconomic-status/
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