By Liz Tobin-Tyler and Joel Teitelbaum
To us, health justice means change.
Changes to norms and attitudes, to systems and environments, to law and policy, to resource and opportunity distribution. Not cosmetic or peripheral change, but wide-scale, systemic change. For health justice to be realized — for all people to reach their full health potential — laws and policies must be geared toward restructuring the systems, practices, and norms that have heretofore advantaged some groups over others, and thus given them greater opportunity for good health, economic and social prosperity, and greater longevity.
We recognize that this kind of change is profoundly challenging, both biologically and structurally. Biologically, because humans are programmed to do what’s comfortable, and what’s comfortable is what’s already known. Structurally, because of the nation’s unique political, social, and cultural attributes. Some of these attributes include a strong sense of individualism, and thus an entrenched unwillingness to prioritize community benefit over individual choice; limited governmental power; capitalism; unprecedented wealth with massive inequality; resistance to growing racial and ethnic diversity; over-spending on the downstream consequences of the failure to invest in upstream wellness; and a willingness to enact and maintain policies and practices that privilege some lives over others.
For these reasons, we are not naïve about the prospects for major change in a relatively short period of time, but neither are we cowed by the challenge. We embrace the opportunity to get uncomfortable, to challenge the racist, gender-based, and ableist norms and attitudes in all forms that harm health and well-being, to raise awareness of the inert systems that perpetuate health injustice, and to promote innovative and progressive law and policy change.
One of the ways that we apply our approach to health justice is our work to develop and advance medical-legal partnerships (MLPs), as both an expert consultant (Liz) to and Co-Director (Joel) of the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership.
