Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Health equity means that everyone has a fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible. This requires removing obstacles to health such as poverty, discrimination, and their consequences, including powerlessness and lack of access to good jobs with fair pay, quality education and housing, safe environments, and health care.
It was felt by some that the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, would resolve these issues, leading to greater health equity, but it appears, thus far, that instead, the gap has widened, which is very unfortunate.
private health corporations remain at the helm of health care in the United States.
Additionally, throughout the book, use of the term minority is minimized in recognition of this term’s obsolescence. The term is replaced by emerging majority, as it is clear that the United States has become more diverse than ever before.
The Institute of Medicine’s impactful, influential report “Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care
1985 the release of the “Report of the Secretary’s Task Force on Black and Minority Health” significantly raised awareness of the disparate health of the country’s minority groups as compared with the White majority population (Gibbons, 2005).
TABLE 2-3 provides
TABLE 2-4
A successful example of a culturally competent system of care is described in the Child and Adolescent Service System Program, where the care and services focus on the family as the primary support and community-based approaches as part of informal support systems (e.g., churches, neighborhoods, healers).
The American College of Physicians (2010) stated in their position paper that racial and ethnic disparities in health care result from the interaction of multiple complex factors, including past and current discrimination in health care, genetics, unequal educational opportunity, income and healthcare access disparities, cultural beliefs, and community systems. They went on to emphasize that the College believes that although improving access to quality care, reforming the healthcare delivery system, improving cultural and linguistic understanding, diversifying the healthcare workforce,
and improving the inequities in the social influences of health may not fully close the disparities gap, achieving these worthy goals would dramatically improve the lives of all people and the future of the nation.
