By Ellen Lawton and Bethany Hamilton, Kaiser Permanente Institute for Health Policy, October 20, 2021
Social ills, such as substandard housing and food insecurity, fuel sicknesses that our health care system must then address. What we don’t often consider—but should—is that many of these social and structural problems are also legal problems. As such, they may have legal solutions.
Health care workers (and health care budgets) feel the brunt of these injustices. When there isn’t enough safe affordable housing and when sanitary codes are unenforced, doctors treat people for the injuries and health conditions like asthma that ensue. When decades of redlining and structural disinvestments in communities leave people living in food deserts without access to healthy food, or their SNAP applications are wrongfully denied, providers must help patients manage related health problems, such as diabetes. Yet health care can’t correct those injustices on its own.
Now more than ever, we are asking the health care delivery system to be in the business of preventing illness. That’s a tall order when so much of what makes people sick are underenforced laws and policies, underfunded public programs, and ill-conceived and/or racist public policies that are outside the scope of what the fee-for-service health care industry and health care professionals are trained to do. One tool to bring about better health and wellness for individuals is to embed specialists on the health care team who are equipped to both advocate on behalf of patients and help change policies that create these structural problems in the first place.
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