Regional
(2008-01-14)
Listen Now:
BRUSH, CO
(KUNC) -
Health Equals Justice
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by Marc Ringel, M.D.
KUNC January 14, 2008
At this moment, poised between the primaries in New Hampshire and South Carolina, it looks just possible that our next president could be a Black man. If that happens America will begin yet another chapter in the long, tortuous history of race in our society.
In this country skin color may not always be thrust right in our faces. But it's lurking behind a host of political issues, including corrections, education and immigration. And, of course, race has a big influence on health and on healthcare politics.
According to a study summarized in the April 2007 edition of Research Activities, published by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, mortality rates for late middle-aged Blacks are about double what they are for their Spanish-speaking Hispanic and White brothers and sisters. By adding other demographic data into the mix and turning the statistical crank, the racial disparity in death rates can be nearly fully accounted for by education, income and net worth. Surprisingly, health insurance and health behaviors, such as smoking, alcohol use, and obesity, explain little of why medium-old Blacks are so much less healthy than Whites and Hispanics.
As a doctor, racial differences in education, income and savings are not my main political concern. Naturally, my gaze stays fixed on our bizarre, unfair, wasteful, abusive healthcare non-system, which I've been up to my eyeballs in for nearly four decades. Every week I see people who suffer way more than they ought to for lack of adequate healthcare or the means to pay for it. I believe now, more than ever, the slogan that we used to shout in the Seventies: Healthcare is a human right. And that's where I'll continue to focus most of my fighting energies.
I've been looking skeptically at the anemic proposals that the presidential candidates have made about healthcare reform. The financial interests vested in hanging onto the $2 trillion healthcare pie are so entrenched and so powerful that I doubt much more will be accomplished this time around than in the dozens of previous attempts that I've seen so far at patching our fatally flawed system. It will truly take a revolution of fed-up citizens to force the rational rebuild from the ground up that American healthcare needs, starting with a foundation of basic services for all.
Then I look at the results of that study and I muse. If poverty and lack of opportunity are the major causes of premature death, a whole new healthcare system still can't bring parity between the races when it comes to health. Only equality and justice can. Let's see if any of the presidential candidates has anything more than a sound bite to offer about that.
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