Health Plan Focus on Race, Culture
Attempts to provide universal health care is being done in San Francisco. The success of the plan is based on rarely discussed notion: cultural competency. Treatment of patients will no longer be based solely on raw data such as cholesterol and blood pressure levels. Demographics like race, gender, sexual orientation and such will be taken into account in marketing the proposed plan.
In a city populated by various ethnic and racial groups, multitudes of immigrants with more than 100 different spoken languages, significant gay and lesbian population, success of the plan will hinge largely on how cultural competency is practiced.