Your health shouldn’t depend on the color of your skin, where you live or how much money you make. But for too many Americans, those factors stand in the way of achieving good health and well-being.
These are just a few of the statistics that demonstrate the urgency of addressing the nation’s health equity crisis:
- Black mothers continue to be two to three times more likely to die of pregnancy-related causes than white mothers, with most of those deaths being preventable.
- Black and Hispanic children are more than three times as likely to experience food insecurity as white children – a condition that clearly impacts health.
- 80% of rural Americans are medically underserved and tend to be at higher risk for poor health outcomes.
Every Blue Cross and Blue Shield (BCBS) company has launched local initiatives to address health disparities and inequities. But there is no single answer to achieving health equity, and no one entity can achieve it alone.
Our platform, Creating a More Equitable System for the Health of America, outlines commonsense, consensus-based solutions that can meaningfully improve how care is delivered and experienced by people who have traditionally been underserved.
This is a roadmap and a call for collaborators for the journey. It recommends addressing four key pillars to achieving equity for all, with specific actions public and private stakeholders can take to achieve them:
Health Equity Platform
Read our plan to make health coverage available to more Americans by making it more affordable.
Read our actionable recommendations that would provide health plans with more tools to address social drivers of health, such as access to food, which determine more than 50% of our health status compared to clinical care.
Discover how we can bring more racially and ethnically diverse people into health care, expanding access to providers who resemble patients and understand their lived experiences.
Learn more about our recommendations for equipping health care systems with more granular, standardized racial, ethnic, language, sexual orientation and gender identity data so that we can measure the impact of targeted interventions and improve health outcomes.
While there is much positive work underway to narrow disparities and inequities in health outcomes, we must—and can—do more.