Poverty Linked to Higher Health Care Costs

The Star Phoenix has a quick story on how a new study links poverty to higher health care costs.  I was asked to comment and you can read the entire article here.

Low-income Saskatoon residents are disproportionately more likely to visit a hospital, make use of expensive health services and take medication, says a study to be published Wednesday.

The paper, to be published in the Canadian Journal of Public Health, is the first of its kind in Canada to link individual income levels to health survey information from Statistics Canada on a regional level, co-author Mark Lemstra says.

The study uses health and income data collected from 3,433 Saskatoon residents between 2000 and 2005. It confirms previous findings that low-income residents are more likely to use expensive health services, such as emergency rooms, and have poorer health overall.

Lemstra says more must be done to elevate low-income people to a middle-income range, which he says could save the province $179 million per year in health-care expenditures.

"You can't have a medical solution to non-medical problems," Lemstra said. "It costs an extra $179 million to ignore poverty."