Cultural Health Capital

Abstract

The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act promulgated a number of fundamental changes to the United States health-care system. Less visible and controversial aspects included the creation of institutions and strategies to reduce health disparities and enhance the quality and patient-centeredness of health care. In this chapter, we offer the concept of cultural health capital (CHC) as a sociological intervention for analyzing these changes aimed at making health care more patient-centered, particularly for historically underserved populations. In particular, we use the notion of CHC to illustrate how patient-centered care is accomplished or undone through complex interpersonal and interactional work that is highly dependent on access to stratified cultural resources that both patients and providers bring to health-care interactions. In so doing, we aim to contest that racism in health care is the primary source of health inequalities. Instead we argue that patients’ and providers’ cultural assets and interactional styles—themselves the product of complex social, cultural, historical, political, and economic contexts—influence their abilities to communicate with and understand one another.