If you were to spend a few minutes brainstorming a list, what would you include as the most important requirements to keeping your family healthy? While this chapter has focused on health care and health insurance as important aspects of health management, the authors of this text would like to emphasize that health care starts with access and decision-making related to exercise, diet, relationships, work, sleep, intellectual stimulation, addictive substances, education, and social life. This is our list and perhaps you have other aspects to add.

Importantly, those individual and family decisions are directly impacted by the social institutions and processes at the core of the United States. Past and present laws, policies, practices, and biases that create and reinforce inequities mean that families live with vastly different access to resources, including food, safe and stimulating outdoor environments, time, work environments, social life, and health care.

Activism can help alleviate social problems, including the problem of poor health experienced by so many in the United States. With adequate health care, there is hope; many countries have successful models of health care that give all citizens access. In this country, groups, many led by physicians or other medical professionals, are working to create and/or modify systems to increase access to basic health care. Two prominent organizations are Health Care for ALL Oregon and Physicians for a National Health Program. If you would like to understand the rationale for single-payer health care, take a look at one or both of these web pages.

While families in the United States strive to make the best choices for themselves, they are limited by the existing access to resources needed to be as healthy as possible. Some of these inequities were created by past laws and practices. But those, and others, can be adjusted and changed. The societal and governmental commitment to the standards of health and well-being, as identified in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, is one way to begin.

Licenses and Attributions for Looking Ahead: Keeping Your Family Healthy

Open Content, Original

“Looking Ahead” by Elizabeth B. Pearce. License: CC BY 4.0.

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