Cost of Living and health

[FourTeaFallOut]

According to a YouGov poll that was quoted in the Guardian today, half of people feel as though their health has been affected by the cost of living crisis. This is being felt across the income deciles - although not evenly, obviously.

Aibu to what the actual clusterfuck will we be looking at by the time winter rolls around? We aren't at the peak of food inflation yet and we haven't had a winter with the svr running at 9-11p/kWh for gas, or whatever it ends up at by October.

How the hell are we going to outrun/ mitigate a recession by growing the economy, which seems to be Sunak's mantra, if a huge chunk of the population is on its arse? You'd think there'd be a plan by now but I haven't seen anything concrete, just mumblings about appointing a cost of living minister and I can't see that will make a blind bit of difference.

I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this and I might be lighting a tinderbox bringing up politics on aibu but I guess I'm asking, wherever you are on the political spectrum, surely we should have a battle plan by now, what the fuck are they all playing at?

I don't know, maybe it's so obvious that it's last discussion. I guess I was just surprised about the sheer number of people in this study who have already attributed health impacts to the cost of living crisis and what that means for when it really bites.

Health means a lot of different things. Unless the question had specific criteria, someone experiencing a little stress might give the same answer as someone pushed to the brink mentally or with a condition exacerbated by cutting back on certain types of food/a certain amount of food. So that might be why the figure is so high.

However I think health-wise we are sitting on a ticking time bomb. Lags in people being seen due to Covid and cuts generally, large swathes of the population pushed into unhealthy eating behaviours, stress and other mental health issues. And no money to solve any of it.

I can see us becoming a very divided, almost Victorian-style society of haves and have absolutely nothings.

I’m neither left or right wing so I don’t consider my opinion politically motivated in any way. It’s just an observation on how much worse everything seems during my adult life.

Yes, I thought that. There was some attempt to guage the scale of health impact, but obviously it was self reporting, which is always going to be unreliable.

www.theguardian.com/business/2022/may/17/cost-of-living-crisis-health-worse-poll-britons

About 37% of those in higher income brackets (ABC1) said the cost of living crisis had had a fairly negative impact on their health, while 16% said it had had a very negative impact. Of those in lower socio-economic groups, 37% said it had had a fairly negative impact and 22% said it had had a very negative impact