Some 20 per cent of Canada’s spiralling health-care costs can be directly attributed to low income and education levels, a new report says.

And reducing the innate health risks that poverty carries requires lifting the socioeconomic status of the country’s poorest people, according to a Health Council of Canada report.

“There is a direct correlation (between) low incomes, low socioeconomic status and health,” council head John Abbott says.

“And when you look at the pressures on the health-care system, who is using the system, it tends to be that very same group.”

The link between low income levels and chronic diseases like type-2 diabetes and heart disease is well established, Abbott concedes. Yet the factors that make poverty itself a health risk will remain endemic among the poor unless the socioeconomic gaps themselves are closed, he says.

He says health promotion programs aimed at decreasing high-calorie, processed-food diets and increasing exercise levels do not penetrate society’s lower reaches, where education levels tend to be poorer.

And even if they did, Abbott says, there isn’t the financial capacity to change to a healthier lifestyle.

“In the short term . . . we need to be more focused in our health prevention and health promotion strategies,” Abbott says.

“But for the longer term we have to address the underlying conditions in which people find themselves.”

Abbott says solutions must come — not just from national and provincial health ministries, but from all government agencies that can have a hand in poverty reduction.

“We need all the ministries really sitting around and saying, ‘Look, what can we do, what can we contribute or should contribute to start to rebalance this in Canada?” Abbott says.

“We need the health minister at the table, we need obviously the education ministry at the table, but we need the housing minster at the table, the industry minister at the table.”

Abbott says new government initiatives should be assessed, in part, on their likely impact on health, particularly in relation to socioeconomic factors.

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He says he does not know if the health costs associated with poverty would simply be counterbalanced by new financing for social equalization programs.

Yet while that “math can be done,” the alleviation of suffering the suggested strategy would produce would justify it, he says.