Michael Marmot: Childhood poverty and health inequity

Achieving health equity in the Americas

By Michael Marmot
Harvard Chan School of Public Health, May 3, 2018

But poverty – what are health people doing talking about poverty? Can we do anything about poverty? Well, you can, actually.

These OECD countries – there’s the United States. It’s looking at child poverty defined as less than 60% median income. In the US, 29% of children are in poverty. In Mexico, 31.6% in poverty.

David (Satcher) will remember, four years ago I addressed the American Public Health Association meeting, 8,000 people. And I showed something similar to this, that the US has such high child poverty levels. And I said– this was four years ago. You had a different person in the White House.

And I said, you live in a democracy. This must be the level of child poverty that you want. Otherwise, you’d elect a government that did something different. But can you change that? Well, yes you can.

This is reducing child poverty by social transfers– taxes and benefits, welfare. Finland reduces its pretax child poverty by 2/3 by taxes and transfers, Iceland similarly, Norway, Denmark Ireland, Sweden, even poor old UK. Oh, you’d rather not use the tax and benefits system.

I was teaching a global health class. And we had a student from Sweden. And when I talked about child poverty and the effect of government policy, this student from Sweden was really confused. She said, you mean some countries just operate their tax and benefit system to have high levels of child poverty? She couldn’t understand why any country would do that.

It is difficult to understand, isn’t it? Why would any country do that? Why would your country only reduce poverty by 18% by taxes and transfers? Pretty rich place.

And my country has decided to make inequality worse. This is the long run impact of tax and benefit reforms in the United Kingdom between 2015 and 2019. Look at families, working age families with children by deciles of income.

If you’re in the bottom decile, the bottom 10%, the Minister of Finance has decreed changes to the tax and benefits system that will lead to your income dropping by 9.5% by 2019. If you’re in the second bottom decile, your income will drop by more than 12%. And then the higher your income, the less the drop. It’s quite possible for the Minister of Finance to redistribute income. Our minister of finance is doing it, just redistributing it upwards and making families with children worse off.

I had a senior politician in London say to me, I’ve been listening to the evidence you gave to the Scottish Parliament. And I thought, what? You’ve been doing what? You should get out more.

And he said, you’re anti-government. And I said, no, I’m not. I’m pro-health equity.

Any policy that’s likely to have an adverse effect on child poverty will have an adverse effect on health inequalities. And that’s what I’m against. And in the US, a less progressive tax code from the 1960s, this is the top 0.1%. From the 1960s to 2013, the top 0.1% had a reduction in their tax by 2.1 percentage points and the bottom 50% an increase by 4.3 percentage points. You’re doing what we’re doing, making the tax system more regressive.

And the much vaulted recent tax bill, by 2027, the top 0.1% will get a 3% reduction. And the bottom 50% will get a 2% reduction. This is what the evidence shows.

Michael Marmot is Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London and one of the world’s foremost researchers on health inequalities.

Transcript, audio and video available through this link:
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu...

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Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

The United States of America - the land with very high childhood poverty and associated health inequity. How would that placard look at our Fourth of July celebrations?

We can do something about it. As Michael Marmot says, we live in a democracy and thus we can have the level of child poverty that we want. Assuming that we would want it to be much lower than it is, why haven't we done something already?

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