HEALTH

Health equality for all Americans including a healthy life and high-quality health care. Everyone will have equal access to affordable, high-quality health care, and racially disparate health outcomes will end. Black health matters, and our work on behalf of families has never been more urgent.

The Challenge: Everyone has a right to good health and well-being, but America's promise has fallen short. Individual health does not exist in a vacuum. It is tied to the community conditions in which we are born, grow, live, work, and age. For people of color, geography, income, and race are longstanding predictors of health outcomes. The roots of historic inequity run deep in fragmented public and private health systems and disadvantaged opportunities across the lifespan.

NAACP is committed to ending racial health disparities. Our aim is not simply disease prevention, but to create an inclusive culture of healthy people and communities. We collaborate with communities through coordinated action to improve the social determinants of health — racism, poverty, exclusion, inferior schools, unsafe housing, poor nutrition, and toxic environments. We disrupt the status quo by working at the intersection of policy and systems change to drive sustainable impact for the sake of our future.

Throughout the world, the coronavirus pandemic has underscored how important it is for a healthy nation to offer its residents robust health care options. In the U.S., our collective unwillingness to ensure affordable, accessible, quality, and timely health care for all has cost too many Black lives and unnecessarily compromised our nation's health and economic security. The U.S. is overdue for a health care system that truly bolsters health for all its people rather than fragments them further.