ABSTRACT
Immigrants’ health and access to services are submerged sometimes within the discussion on acculturation. Norms and practices and behavior patterns of groups and individuals influence immigrant health through myriad pathways that are difficult to predict because of the structural contexts of poverty and discrimination (Virvell-Fuentes et al., 2012). The focus on immigrants is compounded through questions that frame access and utilization of health services as a function of behavior, culture, and minority status. The limiting role of post-liberal economics in health processes and outcomes through its universal conceptualization of personhood and self-care remains underexplored. Additionally the cost-conscious health policy not only excludes the cultural ethos of construction of self but also conceptualizes health as a narrowly constructed idiom of absence of disease. In this way it contributes to defining health and health care in a disengagement of the self with services approach that reduces the consumption of health services.
