Health Inequality & Self-Care

Catalog description

We live in an era where we can easily access the healthy life choices of Youtube celebrities by watching their morning routines, eating habits, healthy food choices, and self-care behaviors. While this is accessible to many of us for free and we try to imitate these upper-middle-class life choices to ameliorate our health in the long term, many of us are not equally positioned to access well-established health care services, receive equal health treatment, and stay equally healthy in the US, even after the Affordable Care Act. The same questions remain: Who is deemed to be eligible and deserving of healthcare services in the US? What should be the role of the state in distributing equal health provisions and treatment to both citizens and immigrants? Is there any hope in overcoming all of the barriers that prevent an entire society from benefiting from healthcare services equally? In this class, by focusing on the period after the Affordable Care Act until the present, we will first look at the healthcare reforms enacted under the ACA and its implications. Then we will examine the most discussed subtopics in the literature, such as: health as a human right and the individual’s inclusion and exclusion through care. While doing this, we will also discuss the role of gender, race, and class and the ways in which these are important social determinants that create health disparities that are visible and prevalent in US society. This course aims to challenge the knowledge that currently legitimizes the existence of asymmetrical access to health care services in society and examines gender, racial, and class disparities from the perspective of health. Offered: