“Poverty silently killed 10 times as many people as all the hPoverty is the fourth-largest cause of death in the United States, behind only heart disease, cancer and smoking, according to an analysis released Monday by the University of California at Riverside.
The new paper on poverty and death was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The authors tied poverty as the cause of an estimated 183,000 deaths in the United States in 2019 among people 15 years and older.
The authors said they believe the total was a conservative estimate because data is from the year just before the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused spikes in deaths worldwide. They said poverty proved to be more deadly than obesity, diabetes, drug overdoses, suicides, firearms and homicides.
“Poverty kills as much as dementia, accidents, stroke, Alzheimer’s and diabetes,” David Brady, the study’s lead author and a professor of public policy at the university, said in a news release.
omicides in 2019. And yet, homicide firearms and suicide get vastly more attention.”
Authors also found in their research that people living in poverty — defined as those with incomes less than 50% of the U.S. median — have roughly the same survival rates until they hit their 40s. The U.S. Census Bureau cites the U.S. median income for 2019 at $31,133.
After that, the impoverished die at significantly higher rates than people with more adequate incomes and resources.
Researchers estimated the number of poverty deaths by probing income data kept by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan and death data from household surveys from the Cross-National Equivalent File.
They then validated the deaths in the survey with the National Death Index, a database kept by the National Center for Health Statistics, which tracks deaths and their causes in the United States.
“Because certain ethnic and racial minority groups are far more likely to be in poverty, our estimates can improve understanding of ethnic and racial inequalities in life expectancy,” the paper said.
Brady, who serves as the University of California, Riverside’s director of the Blum Initiative on Global and Regional Poverty, said that beyond the emotional suffering of surviving family members and friends, deaths are associated with a great economic cost. He said the results deserve lawmakers’ attention.
“If we had less poverty, there’d be a lot better health and well-being, people could work more, and they could be more productive,” Brady said. “All of those are benefits of investing in people through social policies.”
Joining Brady in the research were Ulrich Kohler at the University of Potsdam, Germany, and Hui Zheng at Ohio State University. The paper is titled, “Novel Estimates of Mortality Associated With Poverty in the United States.”
Last May, another study found that children living in under-served neighborhoods in the United States who are hospitalized for any reason are at higher risk for being admitted to the pediatric intensive care unit and dying while there.
That research found Black children treated in hospital pediatric intensive care units nationally are also more likely to die than those of other races and ethnicities, according to the analysis of Medicaid data.

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