The Growing Division Between the Rich and the Poor Leading to Increasingly Severe Human Rights Issues in the United States
US citizens who have lost their medical insurance due to poverty cannot afford medical expenses. Gallup's annual Health and Healthcare survey, conducted between November 1 and 11, 2018, showed that 46 percent of respondents were concerned that they did not have enough money to pay for medical care. A research study by the Urban Institute in the United States in 2018 showed that Texas had as many as 4.7 million residents under the age of 65 who did not have medical insurance, accounting for 19 percent of its population. The consumer protection organization of Families USA released a report on June 20, 2012, saying that in 2010, 26,100 workers aged between 25 to 64 in the United States lost their lives due to lack of medical insurance, a 31-percent increase over 2000. This meant that in the United States, due to lack of medical insurance, an average of 72 people lost their lives every day and an average of three lives were lost every hour. The website of the British newspaper The Guardian reported on November 13, 2017, that being afraid of losing health insurance, more and more US citizens could not quit their jobs and were forced into a state that was referred by the economists as "job lock". The website of The Atlantic Monthly reported in April 2020 that low-income people in the United States would usually delay seeing a doctor when they became ill, not because they did not want to recover, but because they had no money at all. Faced with the COVID-19 pandemic, tens of millions of people in the United States are not covered by medical insurance, when intensive care for novel coronavirus pneumonia costs as high as tens of thousands of dollars in the country. "To be or not to be" is not just a philosophical proposition of some literary work, but a realistic choice that the people at the bottom of US society have to make.
The division between the rich and the poor has led to a decline in the average life expectancy and increasing suicide rates in the United States. According to the data released by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) of the United States on December 8, 2016, the life expectancy of US citizens showed a general downward trend compared to the numbers of 2014, with US men's life expectancy falling from 76.5 years in 2014 to 76.3 years; US women's life expectancy falling from 81.3 to 81.2 years; all US citizens' life expectancy falling from 78.9 to 78.8. In the meantime, the US suicide rates continued increasing. According to the data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2014, there were 41,149 suicides in the United States in 2013, an increase of about 41 percent over 1999. There is a suicide in the United States every 13 minutes, and suicide has become the 10th leading cause of death in the country, causing over twice as many human deaths than by homicide. According to the CDC's Fatal Injury Report 2015, in the United States, there were 9.8 million adults claiming suicidal thoughts, and among them, 2.7 million had suicide plans, and 1.4 million made nonfatal suicide attempts.
Low-income groups cannot enjoy equal opportunities for education in the United States. Rich people always have significant advantages in obtaining higher education resources, which leads to an increasing public dissatisfaction with the US higher education system. As reported by the website of The Washington Post on October 10, 2018, although the distribution of IQ scores has a normal shape in both the group of children born into rich families and the group born into poor families, the former group is more likely to succeed. According to the report, the less-gifted children of high-income parents are more likely to get college diplomas than better-gifted children of low-income parents. As reported by The New York Times, in 38 US universities including famous universities such as Yale University, Princeton University, and the University of Pennsylvania, the total number of students from the top 1 percent of US households is greater than the total number of students from the bottom 60 percent of US households. A survey published by Gallup in October 2018 showed that only less than half of the US population had confidence in the US higher education system. In his report published in May 2018 on his visit to the United States, Philip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, pointed out that among all the affluent countries in the world, the United States had the lowest intergenerational social mobility, and that the American Dream was rapidly transforming into the "American Illusion".
