Economic Inequality and Health Inequality Are Inextricably Linked

The devastation to struggling small towns and cities of Appalachia and the Northeast unleashed by the opioid epidemic has brought renewed attention to the connection between the physical health of individuals and the economic health of their communities. Indeed, the opioid crisis is an especially pernicious example of the many national-scale public health challenges that disproportionately affect economically distressed places throughout the country.

Our organization, the Economic Innovation Group (EIG), works to shed light on the socioeconomic fault lines dividing American communities. We recently cross-walked county-level measures of economic well-being from EIG’s Distressed Communities Index (DCI) with data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), finding that distressed counties have drug death rates that are on average 37 percent higher than well-off places and opioid prescription rates that are nearly 56 percent higher.