{"title":"Relative Decline Is Decline All the Same","authors":"P. Dutton","doi":"10.7591/cornell/9781501754555.003.0001","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This introductory chapter provides an overview of the actual health of Americans. Health outcomes fall into two broad categories: mortality and health-related quality of life. Mortality refers to life expectancy at birth, while health-related quality of life outcomes capture health status and are measured in functional terms drawn from clinical data and surveys. In addition to describing the average health of a nation, health outcomes also provide crucial information about the distribution of health among population subgroups according to race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, gender, sexual orientation, and other criteria. These data are essential to the identification of health inequities and the formulation of policies to rectify them. The chapter elaborates that the book argues that a nation's health system must be constructed in order to protect people's health from many culprits, such as infectious disease and lack of medical care, but also social factors like financial insecurity, housing shortages, and racial discrimination, all of which influence one's opportunity to live a healthy life. It compares the US health system to that of France, Germany, and Sweden. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the strengths of social democratic health systems while simultaneously exposing analogous weaknesses in the United States.","PeriodicalId":285014,"journal":{"name":"Beyond Medicine","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2021-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Beyond Medicine","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501754555.003.0001","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This introductory chapter provides an overview of the actual health of Americans. Health outcomes fall into two broad categories: mortality and health-related quality of life. Mortality refers to life expectancy at birth, while health-related quality of life outcomes capture health status and are measured in functional terms drawn from clinical data and surveys. In addition to describing the average health of a nation, health outcomes also provide crucial information about the distribution of health among population subgroups according to race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, gender, sexual orientation, and other criteria. These data are essential to the identification of health inequities and the formulation of policies to rectify them. The chapter elaborates that the book argues that a nation's health system must be constructed in order to protect people's health from many culprits, such as infectious disease and lack of medical care, but also social factors like financial insecurity, housing shortages, and racial discrimination, all of which influence one's opportunity to live a healthy life. It compares the US health system to that of France, Germany, and Sweden. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the strengths of social democratic health systems while simultaneously exposing analogous weaknesses in the United States.