Tag: health justice

Ridgefield Park, Bergen County, New Jersey, USA Monday June 8th 2020 - Black Lives Matter Protest George Floyd - Systemic Racism Is Real Sign.

Obesity and Systemic Racism: A Teaching Guide for a New Paper

Daniel G. Aaron Leave a comment

By Daniel Aaron

Introduction

Is obesity a manifestation of systemic racism? This past week, a paper I co-authored on this question was published in the Journal of Internal Medicine.

In the paper, Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford and I present an argument that obesity’s disproportionate harms to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) are attributable to systemic racism. We provide a ten-point strategy for studying and solving the core issues.

For health law, public health, and medical academics interested in teaching the article, I have created this guide, which includes follow-up questions you might consider posing to students to stir further thought and discussion.

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Close-up of a stethoscope on an American flag

Why Justice is Good for America’s Health

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Dayna Bowen Matthew

Justice is good for health [and] . . . health is the byproduct of justice.

— Norman Daniels, Bruce Kennedy & Ichiro Kawachi (Boston Review, 2000)

Among the most salient lessons to be learned from the coronavirus pandemic are that unjust laws produce unjust health outcomes, and that justice is just plain good for America’s health.

Health justice is the moral mandate to protect and advance an equal opportunity for all to enjoy greatest health and well-being possible. Health justice means that no one person or group of people are granted or excluded from the means of pursuing health on an inequitable basis. To achieve health justice, societal institutions such as governments and health care providers must act to advance equality, by increasing fairness and decreasing unfairness of their current and historic impacts on populations.

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covid-19 virus.

Health Justice Strategies to Combat the Pandemic: Video Preview with Ruqaiijah Yearby

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

The Health Law Policy, Bioethics, and Biotechnology Workshop provides a forum for discussion of new scholarship in these fields from the world’s leading experts.

The workshop is led by Professor I. Glenn Cohen, and presenters come from a wide range of disciplines and departments.

In this video, Ruqaiijah Yearby, Seema Mohapatra, Lindsay Wiley, and Emily Benfer give a preview of their paper, “Health Justice Strategies to Combat the Pandemic: Eliminating Discrimination, Poverty, and Health Disparities During and After COVID-19,” which Yearby will present at the Health Law Policy workshop on October 13, 2020. Watch the full video below:

A protester holds a sign with a quote that reads: "Pf all the forms of inequality injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane."

Structural Racism, Social Determinants, and the Contested Scope of Public Health Law

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Lindsay F. Wiley

For centuries, public health advocates have understood that our health is shaped by the conditions in which we live and work — conditions public health researchers now refer to as the social determinants of health. Law itself is a social determinant of health. Structural racism and other forms of socioeconomic subordination, which are embedded in our laws and public and private policies, are social determinants of health.

Unfortunately, these statements are not uncontroversial. Commentators have debated whether structural racism and other forms of subordination are social determinants of health, and whether dismantling these forms of subordination is within the legitimate scope of public health law and policy. Critiques run along at least three main lines—semantic, civil libertarian, and progressive.

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