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The ultimate goal of this paper is to determine the differential effects of health insurance and health status on earnings. We believe that employment-based health insurance serves two purposes. First, health insurance provides protection against catastrophic financial losses associated with illness. Second, health insurance encourages consumption of health care services, which may ultimately improve a person’s health and productivity. To determine how health insurance and health status affect earnings, we estimate an empirical model that specifically examines the relationship between health insurance, health status, and earnings. We find the following. Earnings positively affect the likelihood of having health insurance. Having health insurance improved health status for women, but not for men. Higher earnings resulted in lower health status for women, but had no effect on the health status of men, and better health status and having health insurance increased earnings for both women and men. Our analysis implies that there are some returns to employment-based health insurance that go beyond the basic purpose of insurance.

Researchers have spent considerable time studying how racial-ethnic minorities experience poorer health than whites [Townsend, P., & Davidson, N. (Eds). (1990). Inequalities in health: The black report. England: Penguin Press; Platt, L. (2006). Assessing the impact of illness, caring and ethnicity on social activity. STICERD Research Paper No. CASE108 London England), and how low socioeconomic status (SES) can negatively influence health status (Lynch, J., & Kaplan, G. (2000). Socioeconomic position. In: L. F. Berkman & I. Kawachi (Eds), Social epidemiology (pp. 13–55). New York: Oxford University Press]. This research investigates the relationship between class and race and perceived health status among patients with chronic conditions. More specifically, we apply the concept of social capital to assess whether the quantity of health information seeking behaviors (HISB) via social networks mediates the relationship between race and health status, and between SES and health status. Regression, t-test and ANOVA analyses of 305 surveys completed at a chronic illness management clinic in a Northwest research hospital reveal three important findings: first, that social class affects perceived health status more strongly than race; second, that frequency and amount of HISB do not play a significant role in perceived health status, regardless of race or SES; and third, that an interaction effect between frequency and amount of HISB suggests that the way that patients seek health information, and the quality of that information, may be more useful indicators of the role of social capital in HISB than our study can provide.

Ideas of health-related deservingness in theory and practise have largely been attached to humanitarian notions of compassion and care for vulnerable persons, in contrast to rights-based approaches involving a moral-legal obligation to care based on universal citizenship principles. This paper aims to provide an alternative to these frames, seeking to explore ideas of a human rights-based deservingness framework to understand health care access and entitlement amongst precarious status persons in Canada.

Drawing from theoretical conceptualizations of deservingness, this paper aims to bring deservingness frameworks into the language of human rights discourses as these ideas relate to inequalities based on noncitizenship.

Deservingness frameworks have been used in public discourses to both perpetuate and diminish health-related inequalities around access and entitlement. Although, movements based on human rights have the potential to be co-opted and used to re-frame precarious status migrants as “undeserving”, movements driven by frames of human rights-based deservingness can subvert these dominant, negative discourses.

To date, deservingness theory has primarily been used to speak to issues relating to deservingness to welfare services. In relation to deservingness and precarious status migrants, much of the literature focuses on humanitarian notions of the “deserving” migrant. Health-related deservingness based on human rights has been under-theorized in the literature and the authors can learn from activist movements, precarious status migrants and health care providers that have taken on this approach to mobilize for rights based on being “human”.

The “Social Determinants of Health” construct is well-entrenched in the way that both health care providers and researchers think about the effects of social conditions on health. Although there are a number of theories that fall under this rubric for the social production of health and illness, the core of this construct is the idea that social stratification leads to health disparity. In this chapter we show how such a mechanism might work for relating social stratification and job stress.

We used the pooled 2002, 2006, 2010 Quality of Work Life modules of the General Social Survey to test a model of the relationships between gender, age, education, and nativity with “bad jobs” and indicators of health status.

Findings show that social status is positively associated with job quality and with health in turn. Lower social status characteristics are related to bad jobs and poorer health.

Health disparities are thus “explained” by the consequences of social status for occupation and job quality, thereby depicting exactly how health disparities arise in normal social life. The theory and results underscore the importance of explicitly modeling social status factors in explanations of health disparities.

It is common to relate health disparities to social status but it is not common to show the mechanisms whereby social status actually produces health disparities. Addressing health disparities means addressing the consequences of social inequalities for normal activities of social life such as work. Improving job quality would be a health “treatment” that addresses health disparities.

This chapter demonstrates the value of explicitly tracing the consequences of status differences on differences in social context such as work conditions and then health. In the study of health disparities this is not often done. In this chapter we show how social inequality leads to occupational and job quality differences that, in turn, lead to health differences.

To understand how people using community public mental health services conceptualize community and their place within it within the post-deinstitutionalization era.

Two hundred ninety-four service users completed structured interviews in two urban, outpatient, public, and community mental health facilities in the Northeast. Quantitative and qualitative responses to the MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status, Community Ladder version, were analyzed to understand perspectives on community.

Mean subjective community status ladder score among participants was five (SD = 2.56). Participants identified four broad categories of definitions of community: geographic community; community related to social definitions; contributing to society; and mental health service-user communities. Explanations for the location of their placement on the ladder (subjective community status) include comparisons to self and others, contributions to community, and social relationships. There was also a set of explanations that spoke to the intersection of multiple marginalizations and structural constraints. Finally, we explore relationships among understandings of community and perceptions of place within community.

Community integration is a critical concept for community public mental health services, but little research has explored how mental health service users conceptualize their communities and their roles within them. Understandings of community are crucial to appropriately support peoples’ needs within their communities. Furthermore, participants identify mechanisms that facilitate their personal community standing, and these are areas for potential intervention.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest the use of reverse medical supply chain data to infer changes of a population's health status with regard to a focal disease. It includes a detailed illustration of how health status information can be obtained from drug reverse chains.

A Bayesian dynamical model linking drug reverse supply chain data to relevant health status indicators with regard to a focal disease is developed. A detailed implementation of the model on computer‐simulated data is considered. The predictive ability of the methodology is also assessed using out‐of‐sample Monte Carlo‐based predictive analysis.

The results substantiate the good fit of the model to the empirical data.

Difficulty in obtaining actual return data and in selecting appropriate health status indicators. The correspondence disease‐drug is typically not one‐to‐one. Experts' opinion is required in setting up suitable mixing weights as many drugs may inform the health status relative to a given disease and vice versa.

Reverse logistics data may contain potential information, and this is not exclusive to medical chains.

The paper's suggestions tend to reinforce the notion that supply chain data may be used in many unsuspected settings. Solutions to issues of immediate concern in public health require multidisciplinary cooperation, and this paper shows how supply chain management can contribute. It is believed that the potential of reverse chain data in the health status prospect has previously hardly ever been pointed out.

Social participation (SP) has been shown to have a favorable impact on health status, particularly among elders in developed countries. However, empirical study is scarce for China. This study explores the relation between social participation (SP) and health status among middle-aged adults and elders in China when controlled socioeconomic characteristics of individuals.

This paper employs an empirical study based on the data from a three-wave national longitudinal survey: the Chinese Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) from 2011, 2013 to 2015. It collects data from 28,895 individuals aged 45–84. It uses lagged variable method (LV) to address the reverse causality problem, and the random-effects model or fixed-effect model to address the heterogeneity problem.

The paper finds the social participation positively affect self-reported health statistically. The influence of social participation on self-reported health flows through two channels: the improved mental health effect (SP-MH-SRH channel) and the increased income effect (SP-income-SRH channel). In comparison with the SAP-income-SRH channel, the influence of the SP-MH-SRH channel l is greater.

First, the absence of other measures of volunteering, such as hours of social participation that are not available in the employed dataset. Second, even though the LV model and FE model are used in the paper, there may remain the endogeneity problem in the results. Third, the influences of formal and informal social participation should be distinguished in the future research.

Social participation may improve the self-reported health status. The influence of SP on health may be due to the improved mental health effect (SP-MH-SRH channel). In order to improve the mental and physical health status of middle-aged adults and elders the government should consider even more promotion of social participation.

First, this paper focuses on the correlation between social participation and well-being (self-reported health) of middle-aged adults and elderly in China, the previous studies on the issue for China are scarce. Second, this paper uses the lagged variable method (LV) to address the reverse causal relation problem, and the fixed-effects model or the random-effects model to address the heterogeneity problem. Third, the two channels (the improved mental health effect and the increased income effect) are firstly investigated in this study.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the prevalence and predictors of low self-reported physical health status among NSW prison inmates.

Cross-sectional random sample of 1,098 adult male and female prisoners, interviewed as part of the 2015 Justice Health and Forensic Mental Health Network Patient Health Survey.

Almost a quarter of participants had “low self-reported physical health status”. Independent predictors of “low health status” were having been in out of home care before the age of 16 years, being illiterate, smoking 20 or more cigarettes a day, not eating more than one serve of fruit a day, not being physically active in the 12 months before incarceration, higher body mass index score and low self-reported mental health status. Many of these predictors are modifiable risk factors for chronic disease, which could be targeted during incarceration.

This paper demonstrates the utility of a using a single item measure of self-reported physical health status among Australian prisoners, and helps to characterise those prisoners in greatest need of intervention for issues relating to their health.

Social scientists often speculate that both acculturation and socioeconomic status are factors that may explain differences in the body weight between Mexican Americans and whites and between Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants, yet prior research has not explicitly theorized and tested the pathways that lead both of these upstream factors to contribute to ethnic/nativity disparities in weight. We make this contribution to the literature by developing a conceptual model drawing from Glass and McAtee’s (2006) risk regulation framework. We test this model by analyzing data from the 1999–2012 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Our conceptual model treats acculturation and socioeconomic status as risk regulators, or social factors that place individuals in positions where they are at risk for health risk behaviors that negatively influence health outcomes. We specifically argue that acculturation and low socioeconomic status contribute to less healthy diets, lower physical activity, and chronic stress, which then increases the risk of weight gain. We further contend that pathways from ethnicity/nativity and through acculturation and socioeconomic status likely explain disparities in weight gain between Mexican Americans and whites and between Mexican immigrants and whites. Study results largely support our conceptual model and have implications for thinking about solutions for reducing ethnic/nativity disparities in weight.