This quote argues that when health care is run for profit, providers focus on patients who can pay, while the poor and uninsured are pushed into a facility that are nonprofit and overburdened, making quality care potentially difficult to get. The author assumes this outcome is a natural result of profit seeking rather than a deliberate policy choice. They also treat the poor and uninsured as a fix group, when in reality people move in and out of coverage as jobs and circumstances change.

This quote is very interesting to me as it starts with a praise of the US health care and then is followed by a critique. That critique suggests the US systems strengths and failures go hand in hand because both flow from treating health care as a market rather than a basic human right. It also means the same profit motive that makes the system innovative also makes it unfair.

This comment stood out to me because it shows how we came to think about health and how it transitioned from treating health as an individual problem to treating it as a society problem. The authors mention how this can be traced all the way back to the 18th century where they realized that health is different for everyone. A specific example mentioned is the difference between people that have access to clean water and those that do not have access to clean water. This observation led to people recognizing that a healthy population and a healthy society depend on each other.

The authors statement that nurses "advance health, lead change and impact society" is important because it captures what I see as the heart of nursing, advocacy. Nurses assess continuously, at the bedside, clinics, home, communities, and that habit of always watching is what lets us notice patterns other people miss. When it comes to seeing something like the disparity of preeclampsia outcomes for Black women, and it starts to show up as a population level rather than an isolated case it proves its time to act. That's when we need to push for new education for staff and patients on signs/symptoms, plus bias training to decrease this statistic. But is the problem a knowledge gap, access gap or provider bias? In reality it's likely all three, which is why education along won't close the gap. Access and prover bias have to be addressed too.

This quote identifies the start of how we moved from seeing patients as their disease to people with meaningful lives. It shows the 'why' for nursing advocacy proving that a patients experience and social interactions are just as impactful as their lab results. The authors make a justifying point by including the roots of the 1960s on why we look past the disease. Which this point is imperative when in the world of nursing.

Social constructionism serves as a necessary counterpoint as the author mentions. It is a counterpoint because it challenges the medical worlds model of authority by arguing that biological facts alone cannot full explain the human experience of suffering. This pushes everyone to look beyond medical fixes and address the social system that shape how illness is actually lived. I think this empowers nurses to act as true advocates as it requires us to look at the patient's entire life situation rather than just the diagnosis that brought them into the hospital.

The author uses the phrase 'primary responsibility' to describe sociology role in health. Shows the importance of sociology and how much of a role it plays in life and in healthcare. In life sociology plays a role in how people make decisions for themselves and their health. For example if someone in health care ignores social structure is failing their responsibility to see the whole patient will leave out certain aspects that shape health.

This statement really stuck out to me because it shows that mortality and excess mortality are big aspects that already happened in our world, but don't elaborate on what is currently unfolding. What I mean by this is the death toll numbers do not tell us what is happening at an economic cost of decreased workforce and the long term strain/burn out on health care systems that are already overburdened. It shows that by only measuring and looking at numbers we ignore the millions living in suffering or disease even after the 2020 world we lived is gone.

This statement is making the assumption that the reader mistakenly believes that the WHO definition of health was created for the ways we use/interpret it now rather than for the specific political struggles of the 1940s. In turn it allows us to ask the authors why they kept the true meaning a secret. Was is to avoid a political backlash? This passage ignores the that the definition was left vague leading to different countries and people could interpret "well-being" however they wanted.

This definition of health clearly marked a shift in medicine globally because of how it expanded a concept of health from not just a biological standpoint but to a holistic one. I thought it was interesting how the author made a point to say that this was a bold statement to put out during this time. Which this was because at the time alot of people and countries thought this idea of social well being was communism. Its great how the WHO changed the focus of medicine from just fixing bodies to actually looking at fixing/healing the person as a whole.