Disparity In Public Health Essay

Those working in public health face two grim realities: U.S. life expectancy has fundamentally been flat for both men and women since 2010 (Kochanek, 2017), and American cities are becoming more segregated by income (Stanford Center on Poverty & Inequality, 2018). As the economy grew, medical innovations accumulated, health care improved, and access to healthy behavior and technologies diffused, we would expect to see a continuous increase in life expectancy. These decreasing trends in life expectancy, which are typically age and gender specific mortality rates, are a reflection of local conditions. While our years lived in good health is decreasing, we also see an increasing gap in health disparity, or the variation in rates of disease, accessibility to health care, and health outcomes. Increasing evidence suggests that income and other contextual factors are suggested to play a

SDoH include a variety of factors such as income, employment, education, housing, environment, social support, and access to healthcare. These factors are proposed to influence health by mediating availability of resources to maintain health (e.g., healthy food, safe places to exercise, affordable medications) or access to healthcare (e.g., health insurance, transportation). For example, poverty is associated with greater levels of material hardship, particularly food insecurity. Social and physical determinants may modify risk of exposure to environmental hazards (e.g., lead, air pollution, water contaminants), produce stressors (e.g., financial worries) that amplify stress and stress-related health outcomes, and generate competing economic and social demands which may affect health outcomes (see Figure 1: Conceptual