While this chapter has focused on health care and health insurance as important
While this chapter has focused on health care and health insurance as important aspects of health management, the authors of this text would like to emphasize that health care starts with access and decision-making related to exercise, diet, relationships, work, sleep, intellectual stimulation, addictive substances, education, and social life. This is our list and perhaps you have other aspects to add.
Importantly, those individual and family decisions are directly impacted by the social institutions and processes at the core of the United States. Past and present laws, policies, practices, and biases that create and reinforce inequities mean that families live with vastly different access to resources, including food, safe and stimulating outdoor environments, time, work environments, social life, and health care.
Activism can help alleviate social problems, including the problem of poor health experienced by so many in the United States. With adequate health care, there is hope; many countries have successful models of health care that give all citizens access. In this country, groups, many led by physicians or other medical professionals, are working to create and/or modify systems to increase access to basic health care. Two prominent organizations are Health Care for ALL Oregon and Physicians for a National Health Program. If you would like to understand the rationale for single-payer health care, take a look at one or both of these web pages.
While families in the United States strive to make the best choices for themselves, they are limited by the existing access to resources needed to be as healthy as possible. Some of these inequities were created by past laws and practices. But those, and others, can be adjusted and changed. The societal and governmental commitment to the standards of health and well-being, as identified in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, is one way to begin.
Licenses and Attributions for Looking Ahead: Keeping Your Family Healthy
Open Content, Original
“Looking Ahead” by Elizabeth B. Pearce. License: CC BY 4.0.
References
Berchick, E. R., Barnett, J. C., & Upton, R. D. (November, 2020). Health insurance coverage in the United States: 2018. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2019/demo/p60-267.html
Buchmueller, T. C., Levinson, Z. M., Levy, H. G., & Wolfe, B. L. (2016). Effect of the affordable care act on racial and ethnic disparities in health insurance coverage and access to health care (Figure 7.13). American Journal of Public Health, 106(8), 1416–1421. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2016.303155
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2020, June 25). COVID-19 in racial and ethnic minority groups. Retrieved July 4, 2020, from https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precautions/racial-ethnic-minorities.html
Garfield, R., Orgera, K., & Damico, A. (2020, January 14). The Coverage gap: Uninsured poor adults in states that do not expand Medicaid. Kaiser Family Foundation. https://w