Social Determinants Of Health Inequalities

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The social determinants of health are the conditions in which people are born, work, their age, live, raised, and the systems put in place to handle illness. These environments are in turn molded by a broader set of forces: politics, social policies and economic. A simple belief of public health is that everyone is obligated to health and the conditions that allow for health. However, health is not alike or fairly distributed. In other words, there are both health inequalities and health inequities. Health disparities refer to changes in health status by group. For example, blacks are less healthy than whites and generally have lower socioeconomic status (SES) than whites (Schneider, 2014). These differences are connected to gender and