The Impact of Socioeconomic Factors on Health Disparities

Currently, the United States healthcare system has a "cruel tendency to delay or deny high-quality care to those who are most in need of it but can least afford its high cost," (Shmerling) resulting in rampant disparities in health outcomes throughout the nation. The news of today is riddled with stories of people receiving poor care due to systematic biases present in the modern healthcare system and the effect of the increasingly unaffordable cost of life-saving medication. In order to better understand the degree to which this inequality exists, we investigated which socioeconomic indicators model health outcomes best.