Health differences are not random, but are shaped by social hierarchies like SES, race, gender, and sexuality. Where someone falls in these hierarchies affects their access to resources such as healthcare, safe housing, and social support, which directly impacts health and life expectancy. This helps explain why certain groups experienced worse outcomes during COVID-19.

The idea that targeting individual behaviors is not enough to reduce SES-based health disparities. This connects well to fundamental cause theory because it shows how unequal access to flexible resources keeps reproducing health advantages for high SES groups. It made me think about how public health solutions need to focus more on structural change rather than personal responsibility alone.

This shows that spending more money on health care does not automatically lead to better health outcomes. Even though the United States invests heavily in health care, factors like inequality, access to care, and social conditions still affect life expectancy. This suggests that improving population health requires addressing broader social and economic issues, not just increasing health care spending.

Health problems are not only caused by individual behaviors, but by the social conditions that shape those behaviors in the first place. Instead of blaming people for choices like smoking or poor diet, it encourages us to look at factors like income, stress, and access to resources. Understanding these “causes of the causes” helps explain why some groups experience worse health outcomes than others.

This explains that people are not avoiding chronic diseases altogether, but are getting them at older ages. Advances in medicine and healthier behaviors have helped delay these illnesses, which is why life expectancy has increased. However, this also means healthcare systems need to be prepared to care for more older adults living with chronic conditions.

This stood out to me because it shows that even among older adults, COVID didn’t impact everyone equally. The higher excess deaths among Black and American Indian/Alaska Native groups point to deeper inequalities in health care access and overall living conditions that became more visible during the pandemic. I wonder if these inequalities actually became worse during the pandemic, or if COVID just made people pay more attention to problems in the health care system that were already there but often ignored?

The amount of deaths Covid caused was shocking to me because I never really looked at the statistics, even though I knew it was a lot. What I didn’t realize was how much other medical care was affected, since hospitals were so focused on treating COVID patients that people with other health issues didn’t always get the care they needed. This shows how health outcomes depend on larger social and systemic factors, like hospital capacity and the number of doctors and nurses available, not just individual illness.