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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday February 27 2020, @01:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the imagine-that dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

London, United Kingdom - A decade of "austerity" - a political programme of slashing public spending on services in a bid to reduce government budget deficits - has seen significant effects on the health and wellbeing of Britons, new research has reported.

Life expectancy has stalled and mortality rates have increased, especially for the poorest in the United Kingdom, according to a report commissioned by the Institute of Health Equity.

The report, Health Equity in England: The Marmot Review Ten Years On, was launched on Tuesday and sees Sir Michael Marmot, a former president of the World Medical Association, updating his influential 2010 report, having been asked by the then-Labour government to study the question: "Is inequality making us sick?"

Marmot's latest research analysed a wealth of data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and Public Health England to explore what has happened since his last landmark report. And the answer can only be summarised as: Not only is inequality making us sick but it is killing us quicker.

In the past decade - for the first time in 120 years of increasing life expectancy in England - life expectancy has stalled for those people living in the UK's 10 percent most deprived areas, particularly in the northeast.

Among women from the most deprived areas - especially British women of Bangladeshi and Pakistani origin - life expectancy fell between 2010-2012 and again between 2016-2018.

Mortality rates have meanwhile increased for people aged between 45 and 49 - the generation that grew up under former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's administrations. The report details how life expectancy follows the social gradient - the more deprived the area, the shorter the life expectancy.

Marmot's data analysis finds that, as the social gradient has become steeper, so inequalities in life expectancy have also increased.

Austerity has adversely affected the social determinants that impact on health in the short, medium and long term. Austerity will cast a long shadow over the lives of the children born and growing up under its effects

:- Professor Sir Michael Marmot


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  • (Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday February 27 2020, @11:02PM

    by Joe Desertrat (2454) on Thursday February 27 2020, @11:02PM (#963844)

    But you can afford it if the wealthiest pay their fair share. Just look up some info graphics. The top most 1% have more wealth than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes. And they mostly hoard these resources.

    I'm not sure that tax cuts for the rich are the core of the problem. The problem is that spending continues to flow to the rich despite cutting the share they have to pay, and it is the rest of society, which really can't afford it, who ends up paying for it.

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