Day after day, we see black Americans and their children being victimized and shot by police, hunted by vigilantes, suffocated on the sidewalk, and more. According to Mapping Police Violence, in 2015 police killed unarmed black people at 5 times the rate of unarmed white people. Check out their website – you will learn that in less than 10% of the cases were officers even charged (much less convicted) of a crime.
But institutionalized racism is like a terrible iceberg, with the tip masking an enormous and threatening base. Police killings are only the most dramatic reflection of a system that commits violence against African Americans every day.
Beyond police actions, racism in our criminal justice system is imprisoning 1 in 6 black men. According to the NAACP Criminal Justice Fact Sheet, nearly 1 million African Americans are incarcerated in the US, and they suffer nearly 6 times the incarceration rate of white Americans. Yes, as reported by the Huffington Post in October 2013, nearly one third of African American men will be imprisoned during their lifetimes.
But the iceberg goes even deeper. Let’s include the injuries and deaths resulting from racism in health care. According to Think Progress in February 2014,
“Thanks to structures of racism and poverty that stretch back for generations, black Americans are still more likely to lack access to surgical and emergency medical care, more likely to patronize hospitals that employ less-experienced staff, and much less likely to receive high-quality primary care.”
And these structures of racism don’t just impact access to high quality health care.
As reported by NBC News, they also directly affect the health of black people who often develop stress-related health problems as a result of living in a racist environment. “When a person’s sense of human dignity is violated, there are physiological consequences” according to David Williams, a professor of public health at Harvard University.
A 2015 UCLA study published in Science Daily suggests that an accumulation of adversities, including discriminatory experiences and an on-going fear of being killed, contribute to chronic disease and mental health issues among low income African Americans, Latinos and Hispanics.
In fact, according to a well-researched article in WebMD, black Americans suffer higher rates of chronic diseases like diabetes, asthma, lung cancer, strokes and high blood pressure than their white American counterparts. Combine this with the lack of access to care, and the impact on the black community is deadly. Dying from untreated diabetes or asthma may not be very dramatic compared to being shot. These deaths take place quietly, behind closed doors at home or in the ER, not typically in the street. Yet these often unobserved deaths reflect a terrible, hidden violence against Black Lives.
In fact, between 1991 and 2000, according to a 2004 study by Steven H. Woolf, MD, MPH, 886,202 American Black Lives were lost to inequality in health care.
That’s over 80,000 lives needlessly lost every year. According to Dr. Woolf:
“Our fundamental finding: Resolving the causes of higher mortality rates among African-Americans can save more lives than perfecting the technology of care…”
“The prudence of investing billions in the development of new drugs and technologies while investing only a fraction of that amount in the correction of disparities deserves reconsideration.”
HEAL California believes all of us deserve to enjoy healthy lives in healthy communities. We support equality, justice and accountability in every aspect of life. Yet we live in a profoundly unhealthy society as evidenced by both direct and indirect institutionalized violence against communities of color. The Affordable Care Act has addressed SOME but not ALL of the ongoing problems of inequality in health care.
We must all act together to work for the changes that are long overdue. We must take action to fulfill the promise of our democracy. We must address the vast disparities that so cruelly impact communities of color in all ways, including in health care.
And we have the answer. Many people don’t realize how in 1965, Medicare forced America to take a critical step toward healthcare equality. Medicare simply required hospitals to accept all patients. Yes, desegregation of America’s hospitals is a hidden legacy of Medicare. Read this excellent article from Health Affairs about Medicare As A Catalyst for Reducing Health Disparities.
Improved, Expanded Medicare for All would dramatically reduce the loss of black American lives resulting from inequity in health care. It’s time to join HEAL California in support of #HealthcareEqualityAtLast and #BlackLivesMatter! Together, we will win!