Tag: social determinants of health

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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Medicine law concept. Gavel and stethoscope on book close up

Addressing Racism through Medical-Legal Partnerships

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Medha D. Makhlouf

Numerous studies have documented that racism is a social determinant of health (SDoH) that negatively impacts Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC). As such, racism is one of “the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age” that are “mostly responsible for unfair and avoidable differences in health statuses.”

The U.S. health care system was not designed to respond to SDoH, much less to address racial health disparities. In fact, U.S. health care institutions have racist legacies that continue to influence the way they operate today. When health care providers fail to confront racism within and outside their walls, they perpetuate the racial health disparities that have plagued our nation since before its founding.

Medical-Legal Partnership (MLP) is a model of collaboration and joint advocacy between lawyers and health care providers who seek to improve social conditions that affect health and well-being. MLPs aim to address SDoH on three levels: direct representation in civil legal matters, institutional change, and systemic advocacy. They typically employ legal interventions to ensure that people’s basic needs are met, such as nutritious food, health care, income, safe and stable housing, and uninterrupted energy and water utilities. Improving access to such resources is an important way of engaging with the work of health equity.

While some MLPs incorporate a racial justice lens in their work, many do not. MLPs are generally more oriented toward addressing the effects of racism as a SDoH, rather than as the cause of poor health. But considering the cross-cutting nature of racism as a SDoH, MLPs can and should address it directly. As Director of the MLP Clinic at Penn State Dickinson Law, whose faculty has resolved to incorporate discussions of racism and inequality in the curriculum, I have begun researching Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a framework to understand how MLPs can build on their core activities to further address racism as a SDoH and make explicit the connections between racism and poor health. This post describes how MLPs can address racism as a SDoH in at least four ways that align with the goals of CRT.

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Man holds up a sign at the Black Lives Matter protest in Washington DC 6/6/2020.

How Social Movements Shape the Law to Address Health Disparities

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Aziza Ahmed

We are facing a health crisis in America. In thinking through the causes of health disparities, a now well-developed body of public health law scholarship focuses in on the central issue of law as a social determinant of health. This scholarship examines the issue of how legal rules can determine health outcomes. Property laws that explicitly or implicitly discriminate against minorities, for example, often result in poor Black communities living in neighborhoods in which they may be more exposed to pollutants, resulting in higher rates of breast cancer or asthma. Or, immigration practices, including ongoing profiling at the border, as well as detention practices, may have mental and physical health impacts.

What is missing from legal scholarship on the social determinants of health is an account of how communities respond to change the legal environments that have the effect of producing poor health outcomes. In other words, how do communities demand a better legal system with regard to health inequality? Here, we must turn to social movements who often drive our national conversation on access to health care by doing the hard work of identifying, naming, and drawing attention to the complexity of issues that people face.

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Civil rights march on Washington, D.C. Film negative by photographer Warren K. Leffler, 1963. From the U.S. News & World Report Collection. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division. Photograph shows a procession of African Americans carrying signs for equal rights, integrated schools, decent housing, and an end to bias. https://www.loc.gov/item/2003654393/

Structural Racism: The Root Cause of the Social Determinants of Health

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Ruqaiijah Yearby, J.D., M.P.H.

In 1906, W.E.B. DuBois noted that social conditions, not genetics, impacted the health of Blacks, causing racial disparities in mortality rates. In 2010, the federal government formally recognized that social conditions, specifically the social determinants of health (SDOH), were responsible for racial health disparities.

Racial health disparities, estimated to cost the United States $175 billion in lost life years and $135 billion per year in excess health care costs and untapped productivity, persist because of the failure to address their root cause: structural racism.

Structural racism describes the way our systems are structured to produce racial inequalities between whites and racial and ethnic minorities in the SDOH, leading to racial health disparities.

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Close-up Of Doctor's Hand Measuring Blood Pressure Of Male Patient.

Understanding the Role of Race in Health: A New Digital Symposium

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Craig Konnoth

In the 1980s, a vanguard of critical race theorists debated their contemporaries as to whether law could or should play a role in achieving equity — in particular, racial equity. Scholars such as Kimberlé Crenshaw and Patricia Williams argued that while legal discourse historically had been used to oppress Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), history had shown that in the law also lay the seeds of empowerment. Conceptualizing BIPOC as persons endowed with legal rights, and as a community subject to heightened legal solicitude because of the historical injustices they have faced, has helped undergird their selfhood, dignity, identity and activism. Law could thus be a discourse of despair — but also one of hope.

Whether or not the years have proved those claims correct as to the law, today, a similar debate unfolds in the context of race, medicine, and health care. Today, medicine and the health care system embody discourses of power that rival the law. Will these discourses inevitably serve to oppress BIPOC — and if not, how can we harness their power to achieve justice? Those are the questions that this symposium seeks to answer.

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a crowd of people shuffling through a sidewalk

The SSTAR Initiative: A Policy Proposal for a Full, Equitable Recovery from COVID-19

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Sara E. Abiola and Zohn Rosen

Full recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. will require new policy that promotes equity and streamlines access to social services while supporting small businesses

Unprecedented job loss due to COVID-19 has led to an economic crisis for families of all backgrounds and income levels.

Current health and social services programs are ill-equipped to handle this need. Moreover, long-standing racial health inequities and the stigma associated with using social services will persist in the absence of significant systems-level change.

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Ambassador-at-Large Deborah Birx giving a speech from a podium with an American flag and PEPFAR banner in the background

One of the Biggest Public Health Initiatives in History: PEPFAR and HIV

Daniel G. Aaron Leave a comment

By Daniel Aaron

In October, the Petrie-Flom Center hosted a conference of world-leading experts in HIV/AIDS to discuss one of the biggest public health successes in history: PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. PEPFAR was launched in 2003 in response to a burgeoning global epidemic of HIV. The program offered $2 billion annually, rising to about $7 billion in 2019, to surveil, diagnose, treat, and reduce transmission of HIV around the world.

PEPFAR prevented what could have become an exponentially growing epidemic. It is estimated to have saved more than 17 million lives and avoided millions of new HIV infections. As a result, the speakers at the conference were quick to extol the virtues of the program. Professor Ashish Jha called it an “unmitigated success”; Professor Marc C. Elliott named it a “historic effort”; Dr. Ingrid Katz described PEPFAR as “nothing short of miraculous.”

However, several undercurrents within the conference, as well as more explicit points made by several panelists, suggested the importance of enlarging the discussion beyond PEPFAR itself to include other policies that impact HIV and AIDS, and even other diseases.

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Ohio state flags waving in front of the Ohio State House

Ohio’s Efforts to Centralize Control Over Opioid Claims

Daniel G. Aaron Leave a comment

By Daniel Aaron

On October 21, two Ohio counties are slated to present their opioid claims in a federal trial. However, last week, 13 states and the District of Columbia signed onto a brief requesting that the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals stay the upcoming trials. Their reasoning? States should control lawsuits for harms within the state; cities and counties do not have authority to sue on their own. While it makes sense that Ohio’s attorney general, spearheading this effort, would want more power and control over opioid claims, the move has the potential to harm public health by disempowering local governments from addressing public health crises. Ohio’s three main arguments will be discussed in turn.

Argument 1: Violation of State Sovereignty

First, Ohio argues that the county lawsuits violate state sovereignty and disrupt the “federal dual-sovereign structure” of the United States:

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A photograph of miniature figures of people standing on top of piles of coins at different heights

Promoting Health, Not Just Health Care

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By David Orentlicher

Once again this past Thursday, the Democratic presidential candidate debate began on the topic of health care reform, and moderator George Stephanopoulos quickly steered the discussion to what he termed “the heart” of the debate. Should the United States increase access to care by building on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or by replacing ACA with a single-payer, Medicare-for-All system?

While this is an important question, there is an even more important question for the candidates to discuss. We need to hear them talk more about health than about health care.

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Author Q&A: “Association between State Minimum Wages and Suicide Rates in the U.S.”

Temple University Center for Public Health Law Research Leave a comment
Alex Gertner, BA
Alex Gertner,  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

As the suicide rate increases across the United States, researchers at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health approached the issue by considering the financial anxiety caused by low wages. Alex Gertner, Jason Rotter, and Paul Shafer used the LawAtlas minimum wage dataset to explore the associations between state minimum wages and suicide rates in the United States.

Their study was published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine on March 21, 2019.

Temple University Center for Public Health Law Research spoke with Mr. Gertner about their study.

 

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