Final answer:
Preventative health care emphasizes measures like healthy lifestyle choices and regular checkups to prevent diseases. Inequalities in healthcare access persist, and there are differing theoretical perspectives on health and medicine.
Step-by-step explanation:
Preventative health care is a strategy aimed at preventing illnesses and diseases before they occur, reducing the need for medical intervention. Progressive politicians advocate for preventative health care as it represents a more financially sustainable and humane approach to managing population health.
This includes encouraging healthy diets, exercise, and regular checkups. Despite progress, disparities exist in healthcare access for disadvantaged racial groups, ethnicities, socioeconomic statuses, and genders, and challenges like obesity and diabetes prevail.
The functionalist perspective sees health and illness as necessary functions in a society, while the conflict perspective deals with how health systems can reflect inequalities. The interactionist perspective assesses how health and illness are socially constructed through interactions.
On an international level, different countries display various structures in their healthcare systems, and organizations like the WHO, Doctors Without Borders, and UNICEF play crucial roles in meeting basic health needs in lower-income countries.
Comparing the U.S. healthcare system with the WHO's Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) reveals significant differences, particularly in tackling diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS. While some decreases in disease rates have been noted.