experienced disproportionately negative health outcomes compared to non-Hispanic whites since colonists arrived at the continent in the 15th century, particularly due to epidemics introduced by colonial groups and violent encounters with colonists. A disparity in health outcomes between American Indians and Alaska Natives and the general U.S. population persists today, largely due to a lack of access to adequate medical care, language barriers, and decreased quality of medical services in regions with significant American Indian and Alaska Native populations. One of the elements of the inequality involves the lack of research that begins to look into access to medical care for Native Americans, and when research does exist, it tends to be broad and not focus on specific elements, including childhood. As of October 2019, American Indian and Alaska Native people who are born today have a life expectancy of 73 years, compared to the 78.5 years for the general American population. The Indian Health Service (IHS) is a federal agency committed to serving the health needs of American Indian and Alaska Native populations. Two pieces of legislation, the Snyder Act of 1921 and Indian Health Care Improvement Act of 1976, obligated the United States government to provide healthcare to federally recognized Native American tribes. This responsibility moved to the IHS, housed under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in 1955. The IHS currently serves over 2.3 million American Indians and Alaska Natives population from 573 different federally-recognized tribes. Since its implementation, IHS has been criticized for its treatment of patients. Most notably, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, IHS forcibly sterilized thousands of American Indian and Alaska Native women. A study by the General Accounting Office of the United States government found that, between the years of 1973 and 1976, physicians at four IHS facilities – those in Albuquerque, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, and Aberdeen, South Dakota – sterilized a total of 3406 women, 3001 of which were of childbearing age at the time of sterilization. The federal government has also been criticized for the lack of funding granted to IHS. Expenditures per capita for IHS have been substantially lower than those for other federally funded healthcare programs. Studies have found that physicians employed by IHS express a need for increased funding for the agency to adequately meet the healthcare needs of American Indians and Alaska Natives in the United States. Because IHS serves only federally-recognized tribes, not all