Health and illness must be understood in a social context because society is responsible in part for the conditions that people live in and which, in turn, have major consequences in terms of their health. Many poor in America have no health insurance, nor do they have the money to buy medications, or even to buy healthy foods and provide balanced, nutritious meals for their families. In the South Bronx, there are 600,000 poor people living together, and in Washington Heights and Harlem another 430,000 poor, making up the highest concentration of segregated poor in America, according to Jonathan Kozol in Amazing Grace (1995).
The children here donÆt hang up xmas stockings because they donÆt expect to get anything: they never get xmas gifts, never have a xmas tree, never get birthday gifts. They are lucky if they have food to eat at xmas, and heat to keep them from freezing to death. Trash is piled five feet high in the streets. A woman is taken to hospital - and waits for four nights in a downstairs corridor on a stretcher before a bed is free for her. She has pneumonia and a blood clot on the lung (Kozol, 1995).
Mayor Giuliani promises cutbacks on sanitation and inspection services, and in programs for children and teenagers, reductions in drug rehabilitation programs, which already have a six-month waiting list, and offer service to one in ten of half a million heroin and cocaine addicts in New York, and reductions in lead-poisoning prevention programs, cuts in rat control, cuts in programs to help hungry families obtain food stamps, cancellation of AIDS services to 600 children and 16,000 adults, and reductions in staff at medical institutions that serve the poor (Kozol, 1995). These are just some of the problems these people have to face everyday, along with poverty and lack of jobs, which will only get worse as the city plans to lay off 15,000 workers, 5,000 of whom work in the social services agencies which tr...