How Healthcare Affects Low-Income Families and Single-Family Homes

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Health Care Effects on Lives
Introduction
The state of healthcare in the United States has been a subject of heated debates among scholars and observers. As the largest economy in the world, it can be expected that the United States should have the best healthcare system in the world. However, this is not the situation since the country fares unfavorably as compared with other developed countries, both in terms of healthcare spending and health outcomes (Barrett). During the peak of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the real situation with the American healthcare system came to light as many Americans realized that they could not access or afford healthcare. This has been the result of a combination of factors, including the structure of the system, pricing for healthcare services, disease burden, and the delivery systems. However, the main concern for the system should be that many Americans fall under the category of low-income earners, which detrimentally affects affordability. This raises the question of how healthcare affects low-income families and single-family homes.
The focus of this essay is to address the question of how healthcare affects single-family homes and low-income families. To achieve this objective, the essay will present an overview of healthcare inequality in the United States, which explains how low-come individuals are adversely affected by negative healthcare outcomes. A discussion of the state of low-income families and single-family homes will follow, after which the affordability of health insurance will be explored. Lastly, the efforts of the government to address the health issues of these families will be examined.
Background to Health Inequality
Health inequality is a serious phenomenon across the world associated with a large number of people being unable to access healthcare services or disproportionately suffering health problems due to several reasons. According to Weinstein et al., the inequalities result from social, environmental, structural, and economic disparities causing intergroup differences in terms of health outcomes (99). Therefore, talking about low-income families means taking the low economic status as the reason they face the health effects. The American economy is capitalistic, which means that it embraces free markets where private individuals are allowed to possess and control factors of production. The result is that a few individuals have managed to amass massive resources leaving the larger part of the American society with little to live by. The economic determinants of health work through controlling access to healthcare services. In other words, health care in the United States has become commodified and subjected to the market forces of demand and supply. The high demand has forced the prices to rise since the supply remains less elastic. Therefore, individuals with low incomes could find themselves in a situation where they cannot afford healthcare services.
The health disparities in the United States disproportionately affect certain populations due to systemic issues that the country has faced for centuries. When considering low-income families, most of them comprise minority races, especially African A...