As experts, lawyers and Leaders face flaws in California’s distorted health care system, often finding themselves asking a basic question: How much of the wild variance in health outcomes across the state is predetermined?
Some of the answers feel self-evident: marginalized groups in the country have suffered from poorer health outcomes for decades, not years. A system built to earn first and foremost profits and care for patients again is not going to tilt these results in a positive direction without forcible redirection.
But, notes Michelle Burton, there is also a bigger problem to consider.
“The truth is, we’re vulnerable in our communities – or at risk – because of continued racism and oppression that has been embedded in these systems,” says Burton, chief strategy officer at the Institute for Social Change, part of the Institute for Community Health Councils in Los Angeles. “Most visible [manifestation] That in the Los Angeles County is gentrification. You currently have huge amounts of mostly black and brown people displaced from communities they have lived in for four, five, six generations. The LA district is divided among the developer community. “
As low-income families and colorful communities are pushed out of their neighborhoods by redevelopment, the search for affordable housing becomes desperate. Families often find themselves in much worse living conditions, Burton says, with disastrous consequences for long-term health and well-being.
In this week’s episode of Capital & Maine’s podcast series, The Crossing, we talk to Burton about how structural racism affects – and will continue to shape – the health outcomes of entire sections of people living in California.
Copyright 2021 Capital & Main