Health Discussion responses

1. The Healthy People 2020 health disparities tool summarizes health disparities and displays changes in health disparities over time, the disparities are shown by sex, race/ethnicity, educational attainment, and family income. After visiting and reading through the overviews of the different types of health disparities the topic that caught my attention was one disparity of family income. Poverty is nothing new and there is an obvious gap between the poor and the wealthy especially when it comes to resources. Families living in poverty do not available to them everything they need to survive. Many people living in poverty cannot afford health insurance and even if they can there are times, they do not have enough to get even simple surgeries that could give them a better-quality life.

In addition, family income can also play a big part in the kind of care a person could receive. This could mean getting the best doctor or not. Even simple exams, tests, or check-ups can be something families don’t get to prioritize because they can’t afford to. Children suffer the most in situations when their parents aren't financially able to care for them, their health is put at risk and this could potentially affect them in school, and in every other aspect of their life. According to Brown, “Epidemiologists have long known that poverty is associated with higher rates of morbidity and mortality.” Socially based disparities in health status continue to plague even the most egalitarian societies despite public policies that aim to reduce or eliminate them. It’s awful to see how our government sees the disparity and yet they are not able to give the resources people need even if it’s as basic as an exam. The adverse effects of poverty can be directly linked to due to living in a very unequal society. According to Wildman, “It is shown that the impact of income inequality can have potentially far-reaching implications for modelling individual and societal health.” The effects of poverty in families do not only affect the families directly but ultimately will affect everyone as a society. The overall health of a society is important and is completely overlooked.

2. The disparity I found to be interesting on the Healthy People 2020 website is cigarette smoking in adults. This was of interest to me because even though people know what smoking cigarettes can do to the body in the long run and even to others that they are around they still have the habit of doing it. This can be true for many other things that people do like alcohol consumption and doing various other drugs because after a while the act becomes addicting and people need the drug, in this case cigarette. One disadvantage that cigarette smokers put themselves at risk of having later in life is cancer. Smoking doesn’t cause just one type of cancer, there are many different cancers that stem from smoking, like throat and lung cancer. Those that smoke cigarettes expose themselves to twelve different types of cancers. Smoking is the cause of 30 percent of deaths in the U.S (Public Health Implications, 2015).According to Healthy People 2020, those that engage in smoking the most over the age of 18 are individuals that had a family income below 100 percent of the poverty threshold (Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, 2020). Coincidentally, poverty is one of the main factors in crime, drug abuse, depression, and other things. Just reading the statistics of that I think it would be safe to assume, also, that minorities have higher rates of smoking.

3. After browsing around on the Healthy People 2020 website, I decided to look at disparities by race and ethnicity. Specifically, I looked at those who are medically insured and under 65 years of age. After looking at the differences in percentages between each race and ethnicity, I was actually surprised that the percentages were as high as they were, and not any lower. There was no race or ethnicity that fell under 70%. The biggest percentage gap was between Asian only, which was at 92.6%, and American Indian or Alaska Native only which fell at 71.4%. A 20% difference is obviously a large enough gap to cause an arise for concern, however it is important to note that American Indians and Alaskan Natives often use holistic approaches to medicine. While this may seem like a stretch, I still think that viewing races and ethnicities at a different perspective is important when comparing these disparities. Especially when it comes to health, different ethnicities have different beliefs and practices when it comes to medicine and health. While this does not necessarily benefit the Healthy People 2020 data, it is important to note this because there will always be some sort of gap due to beliefs and practices. 

4. According to Healthy People 2020, a health disparity is a “health difference that is closely linked with social, economic, or environmental disadvantage.” One disparity in particular mentioned is family income (percent poverty guidelines) and its effect on children aged 3 to 11 exposed to secondhand smoke. According to Healthy People 2020, there is a relationship between these two things where the lower the family’s income, the more children ages 3 to 11 are exposed to secondhand smoke. I found this relationship to be very interesting because it wasn’t one that I was aware of at all. Although, I can imagine that people with incomes in the poverty level would be more susceptible to using substances such as tobacco because these are often things that are turned to when people are stressed. And, being that these people are struggling with money, they are likely very stressed. Other substances, such as drugs and alcohol, are known to be used in lower income families as well, but I hadn’t heard previously of secondhand smoke being a variable. Another interesting disparity that has a large effect on children exposed to secondhand smoke is health insurance status. According to Healthy People 2020, those with public insurance are much more likely to have children exposed to secondhand smoke than those who are uninsured, and those who are uninsured are much more likely than those with private insurance. I found this to be unusual, as I would expect it to be those who are uninsured to be the worst group with public insurance in the middle and private at the bottom.

5. When looking at many different disparities in health outcomes its clear to see there are a lot of different numbers depending on the problem that you may face. One that i took note of is to increase the proportion of persons with prescription drug insurance as i feel a lot of people fall short. Looking at the numbers shown it has had a steady rate of around 61.1 per year from 2015 to 2018 which is quite incredible since a lot of people who actually do need medicine cant afford it as the companies over charge some of these medications needed for people. In which case if they do not have insurance that covers all of the pay people have to turn away and see what else they can do to keep their health up. You can see this a lot in people who have diabetes as the company's that supplies insulin tend to charge a lot of money in which if the insurance doesn't cover it or all of it people will try and ration what they have. In many cases can lead the the person getting sicker as they can't afford to be healthy with how the insurance company's wont accept to pay all of it or just some of it.