Directing Health Messages Toward African Americans: Attitudes Toward Health Care and the Mass Media

First Published in 1998. Since the research for this book was completed in 1995, the Clinton Health Security Act of 1993 has vanished. The proposed comprehensive benefits that were to be guaranteed to every American never materialized. Pres. Clinton was never able to present an acceptable way to pay for the system, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, who spearheaded health care reform was relegated back to nearly invisible First Lady status. When Congress takes up health care issues today, the debate is more likely to be about late-term abortion, Medicare reform, or tobacco and smoking regulations. Minority health care—especially preventive health care—has not become part of the national debate and likely will not do so during the 20th Century. Political correctness and research on black health care issues have clashed in a way that the research in this book perhaps could have predicted.