By Daniel E. Dawes
Martin Luther King Jr. Day provides Americans with an opportunity to pause and reflect on the civil rights movement —the progress made and the challenges that still linger. As King recognized, there was one form of inequality that was most shocking and inhumane but is continually ignored: injustice in health care. Fifty two years after his death, we have made significant strides in scaling the mountain to health equity, but the accompanying fight to ensure that every individual has a fair opportunity to achieve their optimal level of health is shaping up to be one of the defining challenges of our time.
One of the major barriers to accomplishing this goal is the lingering presence of health disparities — the differences in health and health care between population groups that occur across the life course and in many dimensions, including race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, age, location, gender, disability status and sexual orientation. (Read more)
