The medicalization model of poverty leads us to devote considerable resources to treating the healthcare problems caused by poverty while neglecting the root cause of those problems — the poverty itself. Treating symptoms rather than causes is far less effective than treating causes. When correctly understood, poverty is a major public health problem that needs to be addressed directly with effective anti-poverty programs. Only then can we properly serve the healthcare needs of the poor.

American society tends to medicalize or criminalize social problems. Criminal justice reformers have made arguments for a positive role in the relief of poverty that are similar to those aired in healthcare today. The consequences of criminalizing poverty caution against its continued medicalization.

Is the medicalization of poverty a rational and humane response to an intractable problem, or just the latest in a long series of ineffective and costly attempts to address the problem? Considerable ink has been spilled on the dispute, with each side marshalling heart-rending anecdotes to help make their case — along with the obligatory statistics and regression analyses. Rather than add more verbiage to that dispute, this article sketches out a framework for understanding the phenomenon of medicalization, along with a description of the demand-side and supply-side factors that have brought us to this pass.

“Medicalization” has been a contentious notion since its introduction centuries ago. While some scholars lamented a medical overreach into social domains, others hailed its promise for social justice advocacy. Against the backdrop of a growing commitment to health equity across the nation, this article reviews historical interpretations of medicalization, offers an application of the term to non-biologic risk factors for disease, and presents the case of housing the demonstrate the great potential of medicalizing poverty.

Should Medicaid pay for supportive housing for homeless persons? After describing current limits on how states can use Medicaid funds to support housing, this article considers whether justice requires treating Medicaid recipients residing in nursing homes and Medicaid recipients needing supportive housing similarly.

This article examines five different Medical-Legal Partnerships (MLPs) associated with Yale Law School in New Haven, Connecticut to illustrate how MLP addresses the social determinants of poor health. These MLPs address varied and distinct health and legal needs of unique patient populations, including: 1) children; 2) immigrants; 3) formerly incarcerated individuals; 4) patients with cancer in palliative care; and 5) veterans. The article charts a research agenda to create the evidence base for quality and evaluation metrics, capacity building, sustainability, and best practices; it also focuses specifically on a research agenda that identifies the value of the lawyers in MLP. Such a focus on the “L” has been lacking and is overdue.

Mortality rates for middle-aged whites in the U.S. are rising due to drugs, alcohol, and depression. Unique to our country, these “deaths of despair” disproportionately occur among the under-educated, who are at particular risk for dying young. At one time, less-educated persons aspired to work in the same factory as their parents, at union wages, with benefits. Those jobs, and the sense of community and prosperity and security they allowed, are evaporating. Many former workers suffer from chronic pain, which underlies America's ongoing opioid overdose epidemic. The pain is not only physical. It is psychic, spiritual, and economic.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), passed in 2010, is considered by many to be the most significant healthcare overhaul since the 1960s, but part of its promise — improvement of population health through requirements for non-profit hospitals to provide “community benefit” — has not been met. This paper examines the history of community benefit legislation, how community benefit dollars are allocated, and innovative practices by a few hospitals and communities that are addressing primarily non-medical factors that influence health such as social disadvantage, attitudes, beliefs, risk exposure, and social inequalities.

Collecting and deploying poverty-related data is an important starting point for leveraging data regarding social determinants of health in precision medicine. However, we must rethink how we collect and deploy such data. Current modes of collection yield imprecise data that is unsuited for research. Better data can be collected by cross-referencing other sources such as employers and public benefit programs, and by incentivizing and encouraging patients and providers to provide more accurate information. Data thus collected can be used to provide appropriate individual-level clinical and non-clinical care, and to systematically determine what share of social resources healthcare should consume.

The United States relies on uncompensated family caregivers to provide most of the long-term care required by older adults as they age. But such care comes at a significant financial cost to these caregivers in the form of lower lifetime earnings and diminished (or even no) Social Security retirement benefits, ineligibility for Medicare coverage of their healthcare costs, and minimal retirement savings. To reduce the impact of uncompensated caregiving on the intergenerational transmission of poverty, this paper discusses three possible mechanisms of compensating family caregivers: public payments, deemed wage credits under Social Security, and income tax incentives.

This article teases out the relationship between family form and the state's social safety nets around healthcare, showing the deep unfairness of measuring social safety nets by whether a couple marries. By continuing to tie healthcare benefits to specific family structures, we perpetuate the “galloping” inequality marking America today.

This article concludes that, whatever happens with the thousands of benefits given to married couples in other domains, social policy should move beyond marriage with respect to healthcare. Delinking support for healthcare coverage and services from family form is just, better assists struggling families, and is in our collective self-interest.

Scholars are beginning to use the concept medicalization of poverty to theorize how the United States spends large amounts of money on illnesses related to poverty but invests much less in preventing these illnesses and the conditions that create them (e.g., economic insecurity, housing instability, continuous exposure to violence, and racism). This study examines the connection between poverty, disease burden and health-related costs through the in-depth interviews of 86 Black mothers living in neighborhoods with high levels of violence on the South Side of Chicago. The rippling costs of poverty and violence include 56 percent of the mothers reporting post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms and 48 percent reporting mild to severe depressive symptoms. Mothers also report poor housing quality such as “toxic mold.” The physical costs include reports of back pains, stomach aches, hair falling out, panic attacks, hands shaking, insomnia (sometimes for two days), fainting from exhaustion and lack of sexual desire, and children with asthma and osteomyelitis reportedly from the exposure to mold. Transformative solutions are explored that build upon the cultural resources of Black mothers (e.g., women-centered networks, spirituality and collective-cooperatives) and engage policy levers (e.g., Earned Income Tax Credit and Tax Increment Financing).

This article provides a broad survey of issues facing rural communities and suggests that medicalization of poverty concepts and interventions need to be tailored to those populations. Rural poverty may be both broader and deeper than in urban areas. Those challenges seem to produce a constellation of health conditions, as rural residents struggle with unemployment and lack of opportunities. Relatedly, rural communities struggle to maintain financially viable hospitals and specialty providers. The article closes by offering a snapshot of rural-specific strategies to address these issues.

A bottom-up approach grounded in micro-level understanding of the thinking, feeling, behavioral, and social aspects of living with low income and associated low literacy can lead to greater understanding and improvement of interactions in the health arena. This paper draws on what we have learned about marketplace interactions in subsistence economies to inform innovations in medical education, design and delivery of healthcare for lowincome patients, outreach education, and future micro-level research at the human-healthcare interface.

This article considers the impact of laws and policies that determine who experiences unplanned pregnancy, who has abortions, and how economic status shapes one's response to unplanned pregnancy. There is a well-documented correlation between abortion and poverty: poor women have more abortions than do their richer sisters. Equally well-documented is the correlation between unplanned pregnancy and poverty. Finally, the high cost of motherhood for poor women and their offspring manifests in disproportionately high lifelong rates of poverty, ill-health and mortality for offspring and mothers, alike. Read together, these factors offer a vivid illustration of the medicalization of poverty.

Many current abortion regulations represent an over-medicalization of abortion or a corruption of abortion's true medical nature, with disproportionate consequences to women with lower incomes and lesser means. This article explores the effects of unnecessary and harmful abortion restrictions on women living in poverty. A brief summary of the major abortion rights cases explains how the Constitution, as currently interpreted, vests the government and sometimes the medical profession with the power to protect women's health, rather than granting this power to women themselves. The article then argues for a new approach for protecting women's health and respecting their dignity by reframing reproductive rights as health rights that women themselves can assert.

Improving the health and life of individuals living in poverty requires new models and new approaches, moving healthcare away from today's medical mindset of acute care toward a conception of healthcare as value-based, which necessarily means connecting disparate impacts with the healthcare services that are delivered.

This reflection on the Medicalization of Poverty asks how healthcare itself plays a role in the development of poverty. Drawing on Governor Thompson's extensive work reforming the welfare system, the reflection first stresses the importance of involving the very people impacted by any reform — a conscious process Governor Thompson used when pioneering the W-2 program in Wisconsin and then extended to the overhaul of Medicare's prescription drug benefit. Second, it stresses the advantage of developing bipartisan solutions to solve hard problems such as how best to provide affordable healthcare and reduce poverty in the lives of Americans.