Tompkins County Stats
What was Tompkins County's poverty rate in 2023?
What is 15.9%?
This Cornell resource offers free, confidential groceries to students and employees facing food insecurity.
What is the Cornell Food Pantry?
This term refers to the social, economic, and environmental conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age that shape health outcomes.
What are social determinants of health?
In 1965, these two federal programs were created to expand health coverage — one for low-income Americans, one for adults 65 and older.
What are Medicaid and Medicare?
Which of these is a social determinant of health: housing, genetics, blood type, or eye color?
What is Housing?
True or False: Tompkins County's poverty rate has increased since 2013.
What is False. It decreased from 20.3% in 2013 to 15.9% in 2023?
This student-run, discounted grocery store on Cornell's campus helps make food more affordable.
What is Anabel's Grocery?
This term describes the compounding, cumulative disadvantage that occurs when multiple forms of discrimination (e.g., race, gender, class) overlap to shape a person's health risks and access to care.
What is intersectionality?
This 1964 federal law (specifically Title VI) banned discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in any program receiving federal funds including hospitals that had previously segregated patients.
What is the Civil Rights Act of 1964?
A student struggles to understand a doctor's instructions because they aren't provided in their preferred language. What barrier is this?
What is Healthcare Access & Quality?
According to the 2025 Community Health Survey, which age group reported the highest levels of stress or anxiety about meeting basic needs?
What is young adults?
A TCAT rider age 60+ or with a qualifying disability pays this reduced fare per ride instead of $1.50.
What is $0.75?
This term refers to the pursuit of the highest possible standard of health for all people, with special attention to eliminating avoidable, unjust differences between groups.
What is health equity?
This term describes housing discrimination policies from the 1930s that denied services to residents of certain neighborhoods based on race, resulting in health disparities — like lower life expectancy, higher asthma and heart disease rates — still measurable today.
What is redlining?
Why might two people with the exact same medical condition have very different health outcomes?
What are their social, economic, environmental, and healthcare circumstances can differ?
Among the healthcare barriers reported in the 2025 Community Health Survey, which was identified as a significant barrier specifically for dental care?
What is Lack of insurance coverage?
This Cornell fund helps low-income students cover essential costs (like winter coats, glasses, or emergency travel) not already met by financial aid or insurance, up to $500/year for undergraduates.
What is the Access Fund?
This term describes systematic, avoidable, and unfair differences in health outcomes between population groups.
What are health disparities?
From 1932 to 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service ran this unethical study in which Black men with syphilis were left untreated without informed consent, even after penicillin became available.
What is the Tuskegee Syphilis Study?
A community intervention successfully reduces the average rate of a disease across an entire population, but the gap between the highest- and lowest-affected groups becomes larger. Did the intervention necessarily improve health equity? Explain.
What is: Not necessarily. Overall health improved, but disparities may have widened if the benefits were distributed unevenly?
How many Tompkins County residents completed the 2025 Community Health Survey?
What is More than 1,800
Note: 2266 opened survey and filled out q1
Every Cornell student pays the same flat student health fee (~$300/semester) regardless of income. Why might this identical dollar amount still affect students unequally?
What is: it makes up a much larger share of a low-income student's available money, making the "equal" fee comparatively more burdensome?
This term describes the pattern in which health outcomes improve step-by-step at every rung of the income/education ladder, not just a gap between "poor" and "rich," but a gradient across the whole spectrum.
What is the social gradient of health?
This 2010 federal law expanded Medicaid eligibility and barred insurers from denying coverage for preexisting conditions, aiming to close coverage gaps nationwide.
What is the Affordable Care Act (ACA)?
A policymaker says: “Everyone has the same healthcare options, so everyone has an equal opportunity to be healthy.” What assumption in this statement is challenged by the concept of SDOH?
What is: People don't start with the same social, economic, environmental, or physical circumstances, so equal access on paper doesn't necessarily produce equal opportunity for health?