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Health and healthcare disparities in the US

Healthcare disparities in the U.S. stem from socioeconomic status, race, and gender. Higher income levels enjoy better access and quality of care. Lower socioeconomic groups face challenges like poor diet, dangerous work conditions, and unaffordable treatments. Racial minorities and the LGBT community experience discrimination, limiting their access to quality healthcare. Gender differences also exist, with women's health issues often overlooked in medical research. Created by Brooke Miller.

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  • piceratops ultimate style avatar for user tian1di2 jax
    why does the u.s.a. support socialized medicine for the u.s. military via tricare, u.s. military veterans via veteran affairs' hospitals, 65+ via medicare, and poor people via medicaid but not for the rest of usa people?
    (13 votes)
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    • marcimus pink style avatar for user Booi
      Now those people are covered under the "Obamacare," which I believe isn't much different from what's been offered by private insurance companies. Before, they weren't required to get a health insurance, now they do. The clear winners in this game of politic I think are president Obama for his legacy and private insurance companies for their new subsidies from the government.
      (4 votes)
  • blobby green style avatar for user Akash Verma
    You called hispanics a race, wouldn't they be considered an ethnicity?
    (4 votes)
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  • male robot donald style avatar for user Dan
    I have never seen a food desert in the USA. Can someone provide an example? Where there are all fast food restaurants and little or no supermarkets.
    (0 votes)
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    • blobby green style avatar for user rabbitsarecute
      During my intro sociology class we learned about current food deserts in areas of Oakland. Certain very poor residential areas in the city have no proper grocery stores, and many people have to get their food from fast food or convenience stores because they don't have the time or transportation to travel to get their food.
      (6 votes)
  • leaf green style avatar for user Zac Curtis
    I feel as if the video was a bit vague on what barriers to quality health care racial minorities face are. I understand other minority groups (lack of women's reproductive research, people with low SES, etc), but it seems like racial minorities were only mentioned. No objective measures were discussed which state why a racial minority of the same SES and a non-racial minority has decreased access comparatively. Could anyone extrapolate a bit on this for me?
    (1 vote)
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  • starky ultimate style avatar for user josephw.se
    What exactly is a "Food Desert?" What are ways that I can prevent creating these food deserts from appearing in my community?
    (1 vote)
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  • piceratops tree style avatar for user Mike Grey
    There's that pyramid again. What are the criteria for each class in your pyramid? Aren't most Americans considered middle class? If so, there would be few at the top and bottom of social stratification and more in the middle...it would look like a diamond, not a pyramid. As is, the pyramid suggests that around 50% of Americans have little or poor access to healthcare, housing, etc. (around 50% of the pyramid's area is in the bottom class). What criteria and what evidence supports this?
    (1 vote)
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    • blobby green style avatar for user Daniel Ogas
      According to the Pew Research Center, the middle class, as of 2015, now makes up 49.9% of the U.S. population. "Lower income" comprises 29% of the population and "upper income" 21.1%. Both upper and lower income percentages of the population are increasing, drawing their numbers from the middle class. So, you're correct, but if income inequality persists on the same trajectory, the shape will begin to look more uniform or even like an hourglass.
      (0 votes)
  • blobby green style avatar for user JJ
    I don't seem to agree with this video—for example, the research part. Cancer research tends to focus more on women's issues and gets more funding compared to its counterpart.
    (0 votes)
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    • starky sapling style avatar for user kassie
      Whether you agree or not, there's a significant amount of data backing her statements up. Historically, clinical studies were done on white men, and subsequently the normal ranges and disease parameters for different tests ignored sex differences. Research has been catching up with this in recent years with regard to sex, but it's still neglected in other areas, like race.
      (11 votes)
  • blobby green style avatar for user Marriam Raja
    I am little confuse about healthcare access for low income people. AS where we live (New York) there is a lot of health care provided to low income people.They have health care insurance which covers everything. They don't pay single penny to insurance and still be treated equally.
    (0 votes)
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Video transcript

- When we talk about health and healthcare in the U.S. I think that we would all like to imagine that everyone gets the same high quality of care, but this actually isn't the case. And a lot of the disparities that we see within the healthcare system in the U.S. are the result of poor economic and environmental conditions. And I have "SES" written here, and that stands for socioeconomic status. And if we think about social class, we can think about it in terms of a pyramid, where we have the highest income and educational levels at the top and the lowest at the bottom. And as we go up this social pyramid, we see that access to healthcare gets better, and the quality of that healthcare also improves. And, related to this, the health of those people at the top of the pyramid tends to be better as well. But the opposite is actually true for those at the bottom of the pyramid, and there are a number of reasons as to why this might be. First of all, high quality medical services are more likely to be located in wealthy communities, as opposed to poor areas or rural areas. Disease is also more likely to spread within crowded living conditions. And substandard housing might not properly protect people from the elements. Also, having a poor diet could significantly impact a person's health, and this is especially true for those living in food deserts, which are areas that have a lot of access to fast food but have almost no access to supermarkets or fresh produce. Individuals with a lower SES are also more likely to take jobs that put them in dangerous environments, which could lead to accidents. They are also more likely to take jobs that involve significant health risks. As an example of both of these things, miners work in very dangerous conditions and are also at a high risk for conditions like black lung disease, which can result from breathing in the coal dust. Also, individuals with a lower SES simply can't afford expensive treatments and prescriptions. Race can also play a large role in healthcare equality. African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans tend to have higher morbidity rates, or higher rates of disease and illness, as well as mortality rates, or death rates. They also tend to have worse access to healthcare, and the healthcare that they do receive tends to be of lower quality. And although some or maybe even many of the racial differences that we see in healthcare can be attributed to the causes that we listed when we talked about SES, it does not explain everything that we see. Even when economic differences and even types of insurance are taken into account, minorities are still less likely to receive both everyday standard healthcare as well as treatments for life threatening conditions. There are also many important gender differences in health and healthcare. For example, men typically utilize fewer preventative services, like vaccines and checkups, even when they are available to them. Women require reproductive services, and unfortunately sometimes access to these services are reduced because of politics and local laws. And while a lot of attention is placed on finding treatments for conditions, such as heart disease and diabetes, often these studies focus on men and don't always include women. And since symptoms of diseases can differ by gender, women can suffer from this lack of medical research. Another group that suffers from healthcare disparities is the LGBT community. These individuals might face discrimination from healthcare workers, which can often limit the clinics that they feel comfortable seeking help from. Transgender individuals especially may face a lot of discrimination from within the healthcare system. And they might find a hard time finding a healthcare provider who has experience working with transgender individuals and can cater to their needs, and this can lead them to be reluctant to obtain services when they really need them.