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Essay On Health Care Inequality

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Health care inequality is a prevalent issue in Massachusetts and around the United States. Low-income families and individuals all over the country are barred from receiving adequate and necessary health care due to a lack of insurance or due to restrictive policies in their existing insurance. According to a report done by the Working Poor Families Project in 2013 titled Low-Income Working Families: The Growing Economic Gap, a low-income family is defined as one who earns less than twice the federal poverty line, while a poor family is defined as one who earns less than the federal poverty line. For a family of four with two children to be considered low-income in 2011, the threshold was $45,622, with the federal poverty line being $22,811. (Population Reference Bureau) Over 43 million people in the United States, including 9 million children, do not have health insurance; the majority of these people are immigrants and people of color. Several factors explain the disproportionate rate of uninsured individuals in these racial and ethnic communities. Anti-immigrant laws leave thousands of people without access to health insurance, and a lack of interpreters and translated documents creates a language barrier for those with limited English proficiency. People of color also suffer from living in a discriminatory …show more content…

(Why health, poverty, inseparable…) Children are seriously affected by health care inequality. Children who grow up in low-income families have worse health than their more affluent peers (Working Families) and a UC Davis study has indicated that the stress of early life poverty may be associated with serious health problems into adulthood. This stresses the idea that healthcare and poverty should not be treated as two separate issues, but should instead be addressed together, as the data shows that poverty itself can make people

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46.8 million Americans were reported as uninsured in 2013, which equivocates to one sixth of the population. Those without insurance have revealed that they risk “more problems getting care, are diagnosed at later disease stages, and get less therapeutic care” (National Health Care Disparities Report) and those insured risk losing their insurance. Inadequately covered citizens are often working-class individuals who simply cannot receive insurance due to uncontrollable inconveniences and therefore jeopardize having medical coverage. In these instances, Americans have a chance of being diagnosed with diseases that they had no opportunity to prevent or could not diagnose them at an early stage of the illness. Patients have suffered unnecessarily due to lack of health care, and “18,000 Americans die every year because they don't have health insurance” (PNHP).

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