Minority Health and Health Equity Archive
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/22236
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Item Why justice is good for our health: the social determinants of health inequalities.(1999) Daniels, Norman; Kennedy, Bruce P; Kawachi, IchiroWe have known for over 150 years that an individual’s chances of life and death are patterned according to social class: the more affluent and educated people are, the longer and healthier their lives. These patterns persist even when there is universal access to health care – a fact quite surprising to those who think financial access to medical services is the primary determinant of health status. In fact, recent cross-national evidence suggests that the greater the degree of socioeconomic inequality that exists within a society, the steeper the gradient of health inequality. As a result, middle-income groups in a less equal society will have worse health than comparable or even poorer groups in a society with greater equality.Item Health Disparities By Race And Class:Why Both Matter(2005) Kawachi, Ichiro; Daniels, Norman; Robinson, Dean EIn this essay we examine three competing causal interpretations of racial disparities in health. The first approach views race as a biologically meaningful category and racial disparities in health as reflecting inherited susceptibility to disease. The second approach treats race as a proxy for class and views socioeconomic stratification as the real culprit behind racial disparities. The third approach treats race as neither a biological category nor a proxy for class, but as a distinct construct, akin to caste. We point to hisHtorical, political, and ideological obstacles that have hindered the analysis of race and class as codeterminants of disparities in health.