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 selfcare 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. This chapter explores the neoliberal economic policy as more than a source of income inequality and relative poverty in reference to the complex health care needs of Asian women in the diaspora. The first section theorizes on the conceptualization of health and personhood in liberal economic policy. The second section showcases the cultural roots of differences in women from Asia. The third section presents the limitations of the existing research embodying disconnect of concerns and the people. The fourth section discusses the access argument offered by neoliberal health planning and smaller models in the community that showcase that access issues can be addressed. The chapter concludes with identifying a need for health to be a social commitment rather than a liberal economics-defined privilege driven by an individual enterprise of self-care.
