Alleviating the marked disparities in health coverage, chronic diseases, mental health and mortality among racial and ethnic groups in the United States will require long-term and deliberate efforts. The combined effect of income and race on insurance coverage was devastating, as low-income minorities with poor health were 68% less likely to be insured than high-income white people with good health. To meet the need for reliable information on national health issues, the Kaiser Family Foundation is a non-profit organization based in San Francisco, California. The effect of health insurance gaps on the continuity of a regular source of care among preschool-age children in the United States.
Unstable health insurance coverage may contribute to the lower levels of physician trust empirically observed among patients with a racial and ethnic minority background (Blendon et al. Frequent changes in sources of care prevent patients from developing an ongoing and established relationship with healthcare providers. This study applied the vulnerability framework and examined the combined effect of race and income on health insurance coverage in the U.S. UU.
The Biden administration has taken steps to facilitate the enrollment of eligible people in health coverage. As noted, the ARPA includes temporary increases and extensions in eligibility to receive subsidies to purchase health insurance through the health insurance marketplaces, as well as incentives to encourage states that have not yet adopted the ACA's Medicaid expansion to do so. These were race (predisposing dimension), income (enabling dimension) and self-perceived health status (dimension of need), and they are among the most important indicators of vulnerability, although not the only ones. Eliminating disparities in health coverage is an important component of addressing long-standing racial disparities in health.
Future research could more fully incorporate the vulnerability framework to address the interactions of multiple risk factors (vulnerability) in health and health care and identify the traits of vulnerability that are most likely to exacerbate ill health and medical care. It is well known that significant racial and income disparities in health insurance coverage exist in the United States. In this section, I first briefly discuss the need to examine the state of health insurance as a dynamic process. More research is also needed to clarify the trajectories or pathways in which these traits of vulnerability interact and affect health and medical care and their precursors.
