Comment by sahmeepee

Interestingly enough, even in countries with tax funded healthcare people with lower income and socioeconomic status tend to receive worse healthcare (fewer expensive interventions, etc).

I'm aware of the UK system, having been born and lived there for over 25 years :) I didn't note that the data was from UK persons, but the general point likely remains, if not as strongly.

While true health insurance isn't attached to jobs in the same way, there's still uneven access - the town I grew up in closed it's local surgery a decade or so ago, so it's about a 30 minute drive, or over 2 hours on a rather indirect bus. Not everyone has a car, or can afford to take pretty much an entire day off work to get there. Assuming you can actually get an appointment, too. Richer areas often are better served, and richer people have better access to transport and time flexibility.

And my job came with BUPA membership, which can also make some things easier, it's not the hard barrier to any care in the same way as the American system.

And while the paper said that it corrected for Socioeconomic status, knowing the /scale/ (and possible error) in that correction relative to the claimed meaningful difference would be useful in studies like this. It feels like the sort of correction should be detailed more than just saying they did it.

But I guess the paper isn't really claiming causation, merely correlation in that it's a predictor of mortality. Though many commenters here seem to assume.