MAIN POINTS
(from interviews)

1. Long-term negative health impacts on children

2. Poverty related premature deaths

3. Health problems from stress, anxiety and insecurity

4. Negative health impacts from inequality, isolation,
inability to fully participate in society
and stigma from poverty

5. Health problems from poor nutrition from
(cheaper) processed food

6. Illness and public health problems from
poverty and overcrowding

7. High use of emergency health services as
untreated health problems become crises

8. People forced to stay in jobs that are destructive
to their health or others' health

9. High health costs from consumption of unhealthy products
(jobs rely consumption of these products)

10. Health problems from bad air and water quality due to
industries that are kept going only to keep jobs

11. Substance abuse related to poverty, pain, hopelessness

12. Substance abuse and harmful consumption due to job stress; or wanting to 'reward' yourself for tedious or exhausting work

13. Health and safety problems from dangerous or poor
working conditions, overwork or lack of sleep

14. Mental health problems from hating your job and/or the
inability to do meaningful work

15. Mental illness made worse by poverty

HEALTH COSTS - Quotes

The health industry is a money-maker and that's why it's being privatized.... It's not advantageous to be healthy in a system that makes money off of people being sick. -Janine

The fast food industry is killing us; it's like genocide on the poor.   You really see it in the Aboriginal community... diabetes and heart disease. How much of it is a choice when people are really, really poor? I don't think there is much of a choice. The food from the food bank, is it healthy? And all the free bakery products... People are living on sweet breads; that's their main food. Poverty is a social determinant of health and also mental health. It affects spiritually in terms of how the person values themselves and feels they have something to give. -Samantha

I think it costs a lot more to keep people poor than with a GLI. In so many ways, the medical system is overrun because of so much illness caused by poor diet. -Mary B

In Africa, so many women have been exposed to sickness because of poverty. They are being used. Women, to get 5 kg of rice to feed their children, men ask to sleep with them, sometimes without a condom, and then they get HIV or some other diseases. Because of struggling with poverty, women just end up doing all sorts of things, survival things. So poverty contributes to many problems at home, to war, to the spread of HIV. Women are being recruited to join soldiers, then being raped. There are a lot of problems that poverty is creating for women. -Evelyn

Most people below poverty level have problems, knowing you can't compete. If you have health problems, you are on the outside looking in, with no options. This can lead to substance abuse. Like in the Robots movie, I'm on the scrap heap. There is no retraining for people who are terminally ill. I was told to do volunteer work, but that doesn't pay your bills. -Sharon

If you wake up in the morning stressing: "How am I going to pay my rent today?"-it's the first thing! "How am I going to pay my hydro? How am I going to feed my kids tonight?" How can you think about going for a stroll in the park and being merry when that is on your mind? It is mental health; it is emotional health, it is everything. Women take it all inward; depression is huge, and anxiety leads to irritability and leads to abuse to the children. Nine times out of ten that is how it starts. -Sasha

Living in poverty is detrimental to everything in your being: spiritual, physical, mental. It takes a long time to get over, lots of counseling and therapy. -Sasha

When people are poor, they prolong getting help and their health conditions get worse. -Aletheia

If we are always set up with systems that only look at short term, this will have a huge cost. We're not going to be thinking that down the road we will be eating vegetables filled with chemicals. Another huge cost is what stress does to people. It is unbelievable - to people's health, to their whole well-being. Problems compound, so the cost to detox and healthcare goes on and on and on. -Faith

It is a major step between what you can live on if you are forced to, and what you need for well-being. Poor people die sooner and have more chronic aliments. A lot of this is from stress, not eating properly, not having health problems attended to in a timely fashion. And some of the drug use, I'm sure, is a way to alleviate the stress, despair and lack of attention to medical conditions. There is stress from living in crowded conditions. Looking at infectious diseases, there is a lot of TB and STDs in the street community. What is that going to do when it spreads? It's just a matter of time when you have population groups side-by-side, where some people can't take care of their basic needs. -Jennifer

When a child faces losses-loss of parents, loss of grandparents, loss of the ability to have their needs met, physically, emotionally, mentally -that makes the child angry and aggressive. The child goes to school; the child can't learn, because of the emotional trauma due to the multiple losses. So then you have a child with multiple issues. The frontal cortex, the front part of brain, does not form properly. This where the aggression comes from. The kids that come up impoverished don't have the tools to control their emotions. They are put with other kids that are the same and that is where all of this negative shit comes from. That's where the gangs come from. Whereas, if the kids had a stable environment, and parents had a stable environment, you wouldn't get all this. Let's start with mom. So mom has the baby; she is poor, and she can't get proper nutrition. I'm not saying she can't provide food, but she can't provide nutrition; there's a difference. And she has to work long and hard hours. So the child is raised up nutrient-poor, fed sub-standard foods-and that is a big one, because if we don't have certain nutrients, our bodies do not form properly. If you don't have the money, you feed the kids [reduced] bread, milk past its due date, or powered milk. A lot who are impoverished live as if they are in a third world country. How can you expect those children to be at a comparable level to a child who comes from the upper middle-class? -Mary C

I don't think that it is unusual for people to be working from a really young age and this is just going to get worse. The effects are staggering. There is only so much energy that any one person has to give. And when you slave away doing work that is not fulfilling your potential, it makes us sick. -Naomi

Fast food is because both parents are working. There's no way to do a roast dinner if you are working, you have to grab something from the store. And that's part of the ill health. -Claire

When I had medical conditions, I was told to get out there and work. I even had cancer once and was taking stuff for pain, but I had to put food on the table and still made myself work, even though the quality of my work would not be good-which, in my case, affected the safety of others. -Dawn

Everyone knows everybody is really sick. You can't get people together in a room and say any one individual is truly healthy; we are all sick. We don't have a shortage of anything other than health - planetary health, community health, individual health.   Not enough people ask why things are a certain way.   They just blindly accept it. This is not a healthy way of being.   -Valerie

I was raised in poverty, but I always thought I could overcome that, and for the most part of my life I did. But now I seem to be short on energy. I dropped off 85 applications in the past year and didn't get any jobs, and your self-esteem starts to go in the toilet. I'd wake up in the middle of the night in total anxiety about what my future is going to be. I tried to make an opportunity, but out of our group of 18 who did a training program to be self-employed, no one has really has succeeded. -Kathy

I like the term "livable". To take that stress off the parent, knowing they would have a livable income, then the savings even to the country would be enormous in terms of mental health, physical health, crime and so many other things. Even with social assistance the majority of the money goes to the people working in the system and the least to the people who require it. If they just gave the money to the poor people, they could manage it better than all these so-called experts. For example a foster parent gets three times more money to care for a child than the parents do if they are on assistance. It would cost less in the long run because the cost of problems are so high: health care, mental health, courts, juvenile programs.   I'm not saying that those problems would never happen, but a GLI would have the benefit of having stability and a softer landing place, time to look at your options, whereas welfare is more like punishment. -Mary B