Crawford, R. 2005. You are Dangerous to Your Health: The Ideology and Politics of Victim Blaming. In: Krieger, N., editor. Embodying Inequality: Epidemiologic Perspectives (Policy, Politics, Health, and Medicine). Amityville: Baywood Publishing Company. p. 79-98.

In this chapter Crawford discusses how in spite of a large expansion of health care expenditure in America, health disparities have not decreased.  Part of the social attacks on the institution of medicine is the idea that if individuals changed their behavior they could avoid the majority of diseases and health problems.  Crawford argues that these claims and rhetoric that align with victim blaming ideologies have been and are utilized to further very specific political and economic interests in the US. Crawford states that the social production of disease is politicized as well as the understandings of how disease intervention. Much of the political discourse surrounding health disparity in the US is wrapped in individual prevention and curbing medical costs via changing individual behaviors.  Much of the discussion is fueled via a blaming of the individual patient for practicing deviant and dangerous behaviors that increase disease risk.  Such perspectives and intervention ideals have proven themselves unsuccessful because individual behavior alone is not an ultimate causal disease factor.  While the American public is engaged in popular discussions about medicine and has a perpetual fear of disease there is a proportion of the public that sees medical care as a right.  Complicating this issue is health care policy, the rising cost of medical services in the US, as well as the fact that the US has the largest public health budget but yet one of the largest health disparity issues worldwide. Within much of the discussion about many of the chronic diseases that are killing Americans is pushing the idea that the lifestyle of ill Americans must change in order for disease risk to decrease.  Much of the discourse sees sick patients as exhibiting at risk behaviors and their disease as in many ways, an embodiment and consequence of their social failure(s). By focusing on the individual instead of the economic, the influences of class and other social institutions is ignored. This ideology of independent responsibility promotes the idea that individuals can live unaffected by their surroundings.