For those in public health the Globe and Mail editorial is
old news. For something that is old
news, it appears to be taking fire.
Wealthy people are healthier, and poorer people are sicker. Anyone
who has visited this site enough will find the recurring theme of inequity in
health. Scan through the older posting,
including what happens when economies fail and wealthy people become poor
people. Health
inequities - stop blaming the victim
Of course, it takes an actuary to write a piece that
spending more money on health care actually won’t necessarily improve health –
it has a high probability of making us less healthy. It is a short piece, but based on the number
of references circulating in the twitterverse and blogosphere, it would appear
to be a revelation of astronomical proportions. More
health care - globe and mail.
Dig a bit deeper, and the debates in the comments on the
editorial are more entertaining and more likely to tweak a few nerves on those
with either left or right leaning tendencies.
The debate itself and the diversity of ideologies reflect some of the
real challenges faced by public health professionals in changing the current
care dominated culture.
A dedicated reader forwarded a relevant study that even more
clearly demonstrates how people’s pre-existing ideologies result in
diametrically opposed reactions to the same information. The study in case is a review of responses to
social media based on US political alignment – which is about as polarizing an
example as the world currently has to offer.
APHA
Social media and communications
Just as we know that changing individual health behaviours often
requires progression through steps such as the transtheoritical model of
change, some evidence supports that community decision making on health
supporting actions like smoking control bylaws go through similar steps.
Likewise why would we not expect populations to also need to
go through such steps. Who better to
take the social discourse from one of pre-contemplative acknowledgement that we
have a health inequity problem, into one of contemplation that a member of the
financial community speaking out that action is needed. Thank you Mr. Brown.
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