Bill of Health was published online in April 2019 by Real Life magazine.
The public fanfare over services like Forward makes explicit how medical treatment in the U.S. is increasingly positioned as a luxury for the wealthy. At the same time, the rest of us are led to believe that it is not money or affordable care that really matters but self-knowledge. Devices like the Apple Watch and the FitBit are proxies for the attentive, face-to-face health care that all people actually need. But in the utopian realm of digital health, personalized on-demand health data is framed as both sufficient and aspirational. Like the latest iPhone, health is becoming an exclusive novelty item, enticing to early adopters with cash to spare.
Danya Glabau 