Health Disparities and the Law: Wrongs in Search of a Right

Abstract

Healthy People 2010 provides our Nation with the wide range of public health opportunities that exist in the first decade of the 21st century. With 467 objectives in 28 focus areas, Healthy People 2010 will be a tremendously valuable asset … . Healthy People 2010 reflects the very best in public health planning—it is comprehensive, it was created by a broad coalition of experts from many sectors, it has been designed to measure progress over time, and, most important, it clearly lays out a series of objectives to bring better health to all people in this country.The current responses to the traditional health perils … have been weakened. At the same time, it seems to this outsider as though the entire public health establishment is united around the proposition that massive public action should be taken to deal with the new “epidemics,” such as obesity and diabetes … . But the use of the term “epidemic” is just the wrong way to think about this issue. There are no noncommunicable epidemics … . Yet the designation [of] obesity as a public health epidemic is designed to signal that state coercion is appropriate … .