Why is my doctor worried about my mortgage payments?<\/p>\n
So I found myself wondering as I filled out a questionnaire before a recent primary-care visit.<\/p>\n
Along with the usual prompts about my health, I encountered a series of questions related to my financial situation.<\/p>\n
The form asked whether in the last 12 months I was unable to pay my mortgage or rent on time, and if I was \u201cworried that my food would run out before I got the money to buy more.\u201d<\/p>\n
These questions weren\u2019t an attempt to gauge whether I would pay my medical bill; they were part of a campaign driven by political activists out to justify socialist policies in the name of improving health care<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Federal rules\u00a0issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services actually give doctors a financial incentive to ask these questions.\u00a0<\/p>\n In other words, medicine is one more institution that has been co-opted to advance a leftist party line<\/a>.<\/p>\n The questions I was asked reflect the activist obsession with what\u2019s known as the \u201cSocial Determinants of Health.\u201d<\/p>\n The way the argument goes, factors like income, education, neighborhood conditions, racism, access to transportation and so on heavily determine a patient\u2019s health.<\/p>\n The\u00a0World Health Organization\u00a0and the\u00a0Centers for Disease Control\u00a0repeatedly assert that these factors are major drivers of disparities in\u00a0life expectancy,\u00a0infant mortality,\u00a0diabetes rates and\u00a0cardiovascular disease\u00a0across racial and socioeconomic groups.\u00a0<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not true: The framework is based on critical logical and empirical fallacies.<\/p>\n It confuses correlation with causation, while systematically downplaying or ignoring biological, behavioral and genetic variables that often have far more to do with differences in patient health outcomes.<\/p>\n But that\u2019s what you\u2019d expect from a notion that has nothing to do with medicine \u2014 and everything to do with politics<\/a>.<\/p>\n A few examples show the absurdity of the activist enterprise.<\/p>\n Under this leftist framework, people with lower incomes must necessarily have worse health outcomes.<\/p>\n Yet Hispanic Americans have a higher life expectancy than whites despite their lower average incomes,\u00a0according to federal data.<\/p>\n That\u2019s a fact of life that activists ignore, because it doesn\u2019t support their plan to divvy up money along racial or socioeconomic lines.<\/p>\n Or consider that black Americans have higher rates of hypertension and stroke.<\/p>\n