Health Care Off the Books

Poverty, Illness, and Strategies for Survival in Urban America

Danielle T. Raudenbush

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780520973602
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Millions of low-income African Americans in the United States lack access to health care. How do they treat their health care problems? In Health Care Off the Books, Danielle T. Raudenbush provides an answer that challenges public perceptions and prior scholarly work. Informed by three and a half years of fieldwork in a public housing development, Raudenbush shows how residents who face obstacles to health care gain access to pharmaceutical drugs, medical equipment, physician reference manuals, and insurance cards by mobilizing social networks that include not only their neighbors but also local physicians. However, membership in these social networks is not universal, and some residents are forced to turn to a robust street market to obtain medicine. For others, health problems simply go untreated. Raudenbush reconceptualizes U.S. health care as a formal-informal hybrid system and explains why many residents who do have access to health services also turn to informal strategies to treat their health problems. While the practices described in the book may at times be beneficial to people's health, they also have the potential to do serious harm. By understanding this hybrid system, we can evaluate its effects and gain new insight into the sources of social and racial disparities in health outcomes.

1

Introduction

HEALTH CARE ACCESS IN AMERICA AND THE FORMAL-INFORMAL HYBRID HEALTH CARE SYSTEM

Latondra Harris and I sat in folding chairs in the courtyard behind her public housing apartment unit.¹ She was a heavyset woman and smoked a lot. She was also quite sociable and greeted many of her neighbors who walked by while we were sitting outside. She called out to them by name and laughed and joked with some of them. Latondra was open about sharing her life experiences with me, and she answered many of my questions before I was even able to ask them. She explained that she had worked for the greater part of her adult life, most recently in a staff position at a nearby university. This job had paid well and had good benefits, including health insurance. She had stayed in that position until her husband died and her then teen-aged children began to skip school and get into trouble with the authorities. Believing that her kids needed greater supervision, she decided to leave her job, which at times kept her away from home for ten hours or more. She explained this to me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, she believed that her increased presence at home had helped her kids make it safely through high school. On the other hand, she felt that taking so much time away from the formal labor market had made it impossible for her to find another job.

During our conversation, Latondra explained that she suffered from many health problems, including high cholesterol, high blood pressure, arthritis, fibroids, and “a mild form of depression.” She had a primary care doctor whose office was located near her home, and he had given her several different prescriptions to treat her various health problems. She explained, however, that she did not see the doctor as often as he would like because she could not afford the fifty dollars he charged per visit. Although her children sometimes gave her money, and she earned some money from babysitting, paying for her medication was difficult. Without insurance, her cholesterol medication alone cost around $200 per month. Because of this, Latondra would borrow medications from her sister, who suffered from some of the same illnesses. Sometimes, however, she went without any medication.

Latondra told me that she had recently been feeling sicker than usual. She explained: “Yesterday was a bad day for me. It was a real, real bad day for me. It started OK, I wasn’t feeling [anything], but then, all of a sudden, everything in me was hurting. I couldn’t move, I had chills, I was shaking. And you know, I’m not a heat person, you know [it’s hot out] . . . and I’m sitting outside and I’m actually freezing and I’m hurting from the top of my head to my fingertips to the bottom. It was the most excruciating pain that I’ve ever experienced.”² She said that her children had urged her to go to the doctor, but she felt it would be useless. She reasoned that “if [the doctor is] going to send me to do any tests, I can’t do that ’cause I can’t pay for any of that. It’s just like between a rock and a hard place.” Latondra explained that she had experienced similar pain one time before, about a month prior. She thought that she was likely developing fibromyalgia, which would explain why her body hurt so much.

Two years after our initial conversation, I returned to Latondra’s apartment to schedule another interview with her. When I rang her doorbell, no one answered. I asked one of her neighbors, a good friend of hers, if she knew when Latondra might be home. The neighbor told me that Latondra had passed away. She had been admitted to the hospital the year before with stomach pain and doctors had decided to remove her gallbladder. According to her friend, during the surgery doctors learned that Latondra was “full of tumors.” She had cancer and it had spread throughout much of her body before she ever received a diagnosis. She was just fifty-three years old when she died.

The United States is distinct from other developed countries in that it does not have a single, national health care system that aims to ensure universal access to health services for all its citizens. Instead, the health care system in the United States is decentralized and fragmented, and care is financed and delivered through a mix of private and public approaches and multiple subsystems (Fry et al. 2005; Shi and Singh 2010). Private health insurance is provided by employers or self-purchased by individuals, and the government provides coverage through the Medicaid and Medicare programs.³ Central components of health care delivery in the United States include a private health care sector, the military medical system, and an additional “safety-net” system, which aims to make health services available to vulnerable, underserved populations. These include low-income individuals and families, people who are uninsured or underinsured, and Medicaid beneficiaries (Wright and Perry 2010; Shi and Singh 2010).

Due, in part, to its decentralized and fragmented nature, access to health services in the United States is not equal and, in fact, differences in access are highly patterned. These differences tend to fall largely along class as well as racial and ethnic lines; individuals who are low income, live in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities, and belong to racial and ethnic minority groups have less access, on average, than others (Kirby and Kaneda 2005; Andersen et al. 2002; Mayberry, Mili, and Ofili 2000; Brown et al. 2000). In addition to facing more barriers to obtaining medical care, people belonging to these groups are often at a higher risk of a range of diseases, and thus have a greater need for health services. Low-income adults,⁴ for example, are more likely to report having fair or poor health than those with higher incomes (Pamuk et al. 1998; National Center for Health Statistics 2012), and low socioeconomic status is linked to many health problems, including cardiovascular disease, hypertension, arthritis, diabetes, and many types of cancer, among others (Adler and Newman 2002). As recently as 2016, 43 percent of low-income adults ages 19–64 in the United States reported being unable to access some aspect of care because of the associated costs, such as going to the doctor or getting a prescription filled (Osborn et al. 2016). Although there has been significant—and successful—effort to improve access to care through the expansion of insurance coverage under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), insurance coverage gains have recently stalled. Between 2016 and 2017, the uninsured rate actually increased for some groups. Today, millions continue to face barriers to care and a significant number of these are poor minorities (Artiga, Orgera, and Damico 2019).⁵

Findings from this research, as well as the vignette above about Latondra, highlight an important tension that defines the health care experiences of many people living in contemporary U.S. society. It is one in which individuals with pressing health care needs are often unable to access the medical care necessary to address these needs. This discrepancy between need and access gives rise to a question that is fundamental to understanding the health and well-being of such individuals: If people face difficulty accessing care, how do they treat their health problems when they become sick? In this book, I examine this question and present an analysis based on fieldwork conducted in the Jackson Homes public housing development, a low-income, urban African American community.

Existing studies on access to care tend to emphasize determinants of access to health services. Researchers in fields including medical sociology, social epidemiology, and public health have examined individual-level characteristics, such as insurance status, income, education, and race and ethnicity, as well as community-level factors, such as the percentage of people living in poverty, the percentage of people uninsured or publicly insured, and the availability of public hospitals and community health facilities. This is in an effort to investigate how these factors shape access to care (e.g. Andersen et al. 2002; Isaacs and Schroeder 2004; Mayberry, Mili, and Ofili 2000; Brown et al. 2000; Kirby and Kaneda 2005). Drawing heavily on statistical analyses, this research has aimed to provide insight into why some people are able to access care while others are not and what type of care—preventive, acute, emergency, or other—people have access to.

Although surveys revealing determinants of access are inarguably essential for understanding people’s health care experiences, in this book I take a different approach. In particular, I draw on participant observation within Jackson Homes as well as qualitative interviews with Jackson Homes residents and doctors who work with low-income, urban African American populations in an effort to understand what people do when they have a health problem but are unable to access care.⁶ Whether a person is able to obtain different forms of care is one component of that person’s health care experience. Fully comprehending these experiences requires insight into the strategies that people develop if they are unable to get care through formal health services.

HOW DO THE URBAN POOR TREAT HEALTH PROBLEMS?

Common Conceptions

Existing research offers three explanations about how the urban poor treat their health problems. The first is that, if we don’t include the military medical system, there are, in essence, two health care sectors in the United States. In their review of sociology and health services research, Wright and Perry (2010) explain that studies identify a private, for-profit sector through which middle- and upper-income people get care and an additional sector that is used by low-income people who are publicly insured or uninsured. This second sector comprises what is commonly referred to as the safety-net health care system, which includes core facilities like community health centers, public hospitals, and private clinics and hospitals that provide a disproportionate amount of care to vulnerable populations. These facilities are committed, either through legal mandate or their mission, to serve socioeconomically disadvantaged populations (Institute of Medicine 2000). As part of this commitment, these facilities are designed to have low barriers to entry. Public hospitals and some community health centers, for instance, are required to provide care regardless of patients’ ability to pay, and other community health centers offer care according to a sliding scale that takes into consideration a person’s income level and family size. These facilities are also frequently located in areas that are considered medically underserved, including inner-city urban locations, in which there are few other health care options available (Institute of Medicine 2000). In this two-sector model, the safety-net health care system is there to catch those who are unable to get care through health care facilities utilized by higher-income people. According to this conceptualization, the urban poor, including both the uninsured and Medicaid beneficiaries, often seek care in this safety-net system when they are in need of health care.

The second explanation is that low-income people, and particularly the uninsured, rely on emergency rooms for not only emergency care but also routine care. According to this explanation, emergency departments form part of the safety-net health care system along with public hospitals and community health centers. This is because, since the 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, emergency rooms are required to treat all individuals who arrive at their doors, independent of insurance status and ability to pay. Many studies make this claim and explain that low-income people seek care in emergency departments because they lack other options (Padgett and Brodsky 1992; U.S. General Accounting Office of 1993; Albrecht, Slobodkin, and Rydman 1996; Newton et al. 2008).

This explanation is frequently perpetuated in popular media accounts, which lament the overcrowding of emergency rooms by low-income people and attribute problems like long wait times to this group’s inability to get care elsewhere. This explanation was particularly popular before the implementation of the ACA. In 2008 in the New York Times, for example, several articles expressed this view. In an editorial piece, the authors declared, “Uninsured patients—and those who have no primary care doctor—flock to emergency rooms for routine coverage, clogging the system” (“Emergency Room Delays” 2008). In another piece, the author explained, “As increasing numbers of the unemployed and uninsured turn to the nation’s emergency rooms as a medical last resort, doctors warn that the centers—many already overburdened—could have even more trouble handling the heart attacks, broken bones and other traumas that define their core mission” (Abelson 2008). Such warnings have recently reemerged as health care reform once again becomes a central political issue, and media outlets continue to promote the idea that the poor and uninsured rely on emergency rooms (see “How Uninsured Americans Affect” 2017; Groppe 2017).

A third explanation for how the urban poor treat their health problems not only considers the use of formal health services but also takes into account behaviors that occur outside of the formal health care delivery system. Several studies have shown that poor Latino immigrants not only get care at public hospitals and community health clinics but that, when they are unable to access care at such facilities, they also use traditional methods that have roots in their country of origin. These include herbs, teas, folk healers, and prayer (Menjívar 2002; Ransford, Carrillo, and Rivera 2010). Research that looks specifically at the experiences of African Americans presents similar findings and suggests that religion and the use of herbal and home remedies play a central role in African Americans’ health care strategies (Eiser and Ellis 2007). Looking specifically at access to care, Becker, Gates and Newsom (2004) found that their low-income, uninsured African American participants rely on cultural practices like prayer and home remedies, often with only limited input from biomedical approaches and medical professionals. When people are unable to access care, the authors assert, these cultural practices emerge as primary health care strategies.

A Formal-Informal Hybrid Health Care System

In this book, I propose a fourth explanation about the health care experiences of the black urban poor that is in some ways similar to those described above but is also distinct in important ways. While my participants seek care through emergency departments, public hospitals, and community health centers, many are unable to get continuous care through these facilities. As a result, they use informal strategies for treating health problems. These strategies, however, do not typically involve cultural practices or traditional remedies like those described above. Indeed, the residents I interviewed and observed maintain a conventional biomedical orientation toward health care; they think about the treatment of health problems in terms of obtaining care from medical doctors and taking pharmaceutical drugs. The informal strategies they develop thus align with this orientation.

Most notably, I found that people who face obstacles to care gain access to health-related resources through their social ties, meaning through their connections to other individuals. These resources include items like pharmaceutical drugs, canes, walkers, wheelchairs, and health insurance cards. Residents’ ties to people I call intermediaries—individuals who have access to hospitals or clinics either as patients or employees—are especially important for obtaining such resources. Due to their structural position in relation to (a) people who face obstacles to accessing care and (b) the health care organizations that provide care, these intermediaries are able to perform an important function: they act as informal resource brokers. Through their brokerage behaviors, these intermediaries either enable direct access to health care facilities or informally distribute resources like medication and medical equipment to care-seeking individuals who normally face obstacles to health care. I label this form of brokerage as informal because it occurs in ways that violate established rules, regulations, and norms of the formal health care system.

Intermediaries include doctors, friends, and family members of the person seeking care, as well as other residents of the housing development. Some doctors keep special, unauthorized “stashes” of medication for their low-income patients who have difficulty purchasing medication independently. Doctors also sometimes give poor patients money out of their own pocket to help them pay for needed care. People with health insurance go to doctors in an effort to get medication or other resources for their sick and uninsured friends and relatives, and they also lend uninsured friends and relatives their health insurance card so that they can be seen directly by a doctor. And some people with insurance act as “street entrepreneurs,” using...