What Are The Factors That Cause Health Disparities?

The United States is a melting pot of cultural diversity. For a country that was founded by individuals fleeing persecution, it has taken us many years to grant African-Americans equal rights, and even longer for those rights to be recognized. Despite all the effort to eliminate inequality in this country, health disparity among this minority group remains a significant issue. Research in this area has pointed to several key reasons for this gap that center on differences in culture, socioeconomics, and lack of health literacy.

The disparities are around us every day and unless we educate ourselves and our communities these disparities will continue to wreak havoc on our neighborhoods and in the future, we will just be putting our kids and their kids in a continuing cycle of ignorance when we could have done more if it’s just educating the community we leave in, that alone could be enough to turn the tides in our people favor. In turn, I would hope this paper enlighten you on what is going on in our neighborhood and what we can do to correct this issue to preserve our autonomy. Racial and ethnic health disparities undermine what a healthcare system should stand for. Although the top three causes and seven of the 10 leading causes of death are the same for African Americans and whites, the risk factors and incidence, morbidity, and mortality rates for these diseases and injuries often are greater among blacks than whites (MMWR, 2005). Health disparities refer to differences in disease risks, incidence, morbidity, and mortality but most of all for the sake of this paper unequal access to quality health insurance amongst African American in the United States, which will also go hand and hand with the social and economic disadvantages. The disadvantages of health disparities usually affect people of African American descent who have systemically experienced a greater social and economic obstacle to health care.

Racial and ethnic health disparities have been a topic on the rise as of late. According to Flores (2010), little attention has been shown to ethic and racial health disparities in children. For example, only 5 of 103 studies in the Institute of Medicine's extensive review any findings, studies, or literature address health disparities of racial or ethnic issues dealing with children (Flores, 2010). These disparities are and persistent, and happen across the many categories of health and health care. The objective of this study was to review as many off the published literatures on these racial and ethnic health disparities.

Governmental agencies influence health policies by influencing the Federal government, State government, and local laws by using population health research studies and interventions studies reported of health disparities. In addition to being well informed with health disparities they have access to investing, research and collecting evidence in assisting them to gather information that can influence health care polices. With each research that is conducted can possibly create new or old policies to be improved and aimed to reduce health disparities.

A proponderance of statistics derived from scholarly sources corroborates the notion that minorities who have a low socioeconomic position or have an significantly low income suffers many atrocious health disparities this includes obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases thus projecting a direct correlation between the two variables. In addition, minorities, specifically African-Americans that live in low income neighborhoods have less access to fresh, healthy and organic foods. In particular, supermarkets are sparse in their area and sometimes is not within walking distance or within the vicinity of their homes. On the flipside, these neighborhoods have the highest levels of fast-food restaurants and convenient stores. These barriers

Health disparities in populations and population subgroups deal with differences in overall health and the spread of disease and death (Almgren, 2013). There are several characteristics of a population or subgroup that make them more vulnerable to disparities in health and healthcare. These include race, ethnicity, sex, age, education, income, employment, and geographic location among other characteristics. Many of which are linked to social inequality within communities. On the other hand, healthcare disparities include access to care, quality of care, equity, and health care outcomes (Almgren, 2013, p.243). Disparities in both categories can be explained by the social determinants of health that affect many people’s health status and include environmental factors present in communities (Patel & Rushefsky,2014). All these factors are interrelated and seem to affect minority and low-income groups more disproportionately. Meyer et.al. (2013), use the World Health Organizations explanation of social determinants of health as being “mostly responsible for health inequities—the unfair and avoidable differences in health status seen within and between countries” (p. 3). This explanation is applicable to communities and population groups within the U.S. as

Social determinants of health inequity reflect deeper social divisions, which generate multiple risks that are reproduced over time. Hierarchies of power must be critiqued through the lenses of class and race to make tangible the seemingly abstract connections between social and economic determinants and distribution of health inequity. Racism finds refuge in various forms of material exploitation; narrow interventions that fail to address the root causes that undermine the health and well-being of members of the community will ultimately fail.1 The treatment of Mexican immigrants with tuberculosis (TB) by health officials in Los Angeles from 1914 to 1940 is a telling story that made salient the insidious impact of poverty and race on health, and it provides an important lesson for public health officials.

African American women and infants are more likely to be poor, and therefore a higher proportion of this group are eligible for Medicaid (Kotch, p. 245, 2013). How can health disparities be

Significant health disparities exist between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians. A complex phenomenon is considered as triggering issues that hinder the ability to address this gap. The purpose of this paper is to first, summarized the key issues of the article. Second, explore my personal arguments and finally, provide some recommendation for the implications of the Canadian health care system.

In today’s society there are many Health disparities that affect millions of Americans each year. Approximately 1.5 million people, who die each year, die from chronic diseases that are listed as one of the top 10 global health disparities. The type of health disparities that Americans face are Heart disease, Cardiovascular disease, Type II Diabetes, Colon cancer, and Obesity. Heart disease is the leading cause of death throughout the world. Cardiovascular disease and cancer account for almost two-thirds of all deaths in the United States.

There are three categories that summarize health disparities in the U.S. The first is disparities that have a social or economic cause rather than a biological cause. An example of this would be that the death rates of black American men are 26 percent higher than that of white men. Also, the death rates of black American woman are 19 percent higher than that of white women. An explanation for this is because blacks have a lower socioeconomic status than white. The reason for this is because blacks are more likely than white to never graduate high school, or graduate high school but not go to college (Barr, 43). Therefore, those with low socioeconomic status can’t afford to go to the doctor which results in a health disparity. The second category

Within the past couple of year, the United States as a whole has had challenges with improving the overall population health. The increase in healthcare costs has caused a distinct disparity within minority groups. Under the Affordable Care Act, cost and access has drastically affected many individuals. Despite the United States increase in spending, many are still uninsured and vulnerable to detrimental health outcomes. The uninsured have no access to sufficient and effective health care services, meaning they resort to little or no care at all. For example, different racial and minority groups are without access to Medicaid and Medicare due to its restrictions. Targeted groups such as African Americans and Hispanics have lower rates of health care coverage, access and overall quality of care. It is evident that minorities were misrepresented among the coverage provisions of the Affordable Care Act. Apart from such target groups, whites appear to receive better health care coverage and outcomes. This has become a problem when it comes to health care access, meaning there are major health discrepancies. There is a disparity gap between the different ethnic groups that the Affordable Care Act fails to accurately address and provide provisions to such requirements for government-funded assistance programs (Shi & Singh, 2015).

The article, Tackling the Root Causes of Health Disparities Through Community Capacity Building, written by Anthony Iton, explains the relationship between an individuals income and their overall health. Because of the underlying fact that wealthier individuals lead an all over healthier life, those whom fall under the poverty line are at severe health disadvantages.

In the other side, eHealth has been a solution in healthcare disparities. Above the previous period a quickly increasing body of works has established the reality of healthcare disparities. Although agreement has not appeared concerning the reasons of disparities, they are normally assumed to be connected to worker, patient, and healthcare system aspects. On the other side, the present United State healthcare system is concerned with near personalized severe care. Yet healthcare disparities by description are a people equal phenomenon. Persons do not have disparities, but populations and groups have disparities. Therefore people’s equal data alone will not allow us to grow customized interventions. Correspondingly, biologic, cellular, or molecular

Health disparities remain and continue to remain in the foreseeable future a topic of research and debate in health education and promotion. There is a plethora of social, economic, political, environmental, community, and cultural factors attributed to the causes of health disparities. A potential solution for many health disparities is the delivery of cost effective and reliable targeted health education and promotion interventions. These interventions need evidence-based research and evaluation. To develop and test such interventions requires health-related research studies that have adequate representation of minorities. However, most funded research is concentrated to a homogenous group of White researchers and lack of diversity in researchers. This correlates to the absence of diversity in study participants who are mainly White and thus benefitting the most from the findings.