So you'd trade your TV for adequate healthcare? It's not that those things don't have value it's just compared to the real issues for someone in poverty they don't add up to all that much.
A great deal of what we call "adequate healthcare" didn't even exist in 1970.
Cancer was essentially a death sentence back then. So was a heart attack.
No MRI. No CAT scan. No minimally-invasive surgery.
They were still performing major surgery to "treat" ulcers back then. Now we know they're caused by bacteria and can clear them up with no surgery needed.
Really poor people in the United States do get free healthcare. It's called "Medicaid".
Not healthcare, but I would rather live in a house half its current size than give up TV and internet.
People living in abject poverty also enormously value their TVs. Here is an example of a man who goes hungry in order to watch TV, from the book Poor Economics [1]:
We asked Oucha Mbarbk, a man we met in a remote village in Morocco, what he would do if he had more money. He said he would buy more food. Then we asked him what he would do if he had even more money. He said he would buy better tasting food. We were starting to feel very bad for him and his family, when we noticed a television, a parabolic antenna, and a DVD player in the room where we were sitting. We asked him why he had bought all these things if he felt the family did
not have enough to eat. He laughed, and said, “Oh, but television is more important than food!”
If you think the cost of rent and house prices affect the standard of living then so should the availability of TVs and internet.
