Health Affairs June 14, 2018
An ever-increasing body of research demonstrates that factors such as income, employment, housing, education, neighborhood conditions, political power, and social standing exert a powerful impact on a person’s health status and life expectancy. The County Health Rankings model developed by the University of Wisconsin attributes 40 percent of the variation in health outcomes to social and economic factors, which is twice as high as the contribution from clinical care.
That analysis has huge implications with regard to how society’s health-improvement resources should be invested. When he was director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Thomas Frieden encouraged health institutions to focus on socioeconomic factors such as employment and education, which he regarded as having “the greatest potential...
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