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I feel like I've been leveled by a bulldozer. For the past week, Squawker and I have been flattened by some kind of monster flu bug, that's become one of those grim winter traditions: "Welcome to this, buddy!" At least The Squawker and I have been spared what my sister just endured -- the chronic diarrhea and puking bouts that often accompany with these bugs.
However, though I'm mostly over the sniffling/snorting phase, I'm struggling with back pain, which has migrated from my right side, to the center to my left side. Which is rather terribly inconvenient, as our Brit cousins might say, when one is spending a great deal of time under the covers. Or sitting to do a post, like this one. It is what is, so I'll just have to carry on.
Still, in light of the flurry of interest in my last post ("Today's Midterm Message: Life Is Not A Pre-Existing Condition"), I thought it made sense to follow up with a related topic: health inequity. Put bluntly, where you live can literally determine how long you live. Or how soon you die.
That's the thesis of Dr. David Ansell, of Rush University Medical Center (Chicago, IL), who's spent 30 years studying how racism and social inequity impact life expectancy -- one of the simplest, barest metrics of human existence. I stumbled on his YouTube presentation, and his work, while letting my fingers do the Googling (so to speak).
Ansell's presentation, "How Inequity Kills: Health Systems And Health Inequity" (September 27, Lake Michigan College, Benton Harbor, MI) is linked below in its entirety. I haven't seen it in full yet, but what I have caught is pretty disturbing, as you might imagine. Simply stated, the gaps between rich and poor -- which, one might argue, have grown into canyons, if not outright chass -- are also revealing themselves in who lives, and who dies. A lot of this information is deeply disturbing; as Ansell says at the beginning, "I always tell people, 'Wait till the end to clap. You may not like what I say.'"
The venue where Ansell spoke is a case in point. Life expectancy in Southwest Michigan's Twin Cities -- better-off, white St. Joseph, MI -- is 19 years longer than in its largely African-American, poorer neighbor, Benton Harbor. Put another way, you can bank on living to 86 or 87 in St. Joseph, and its equally lilly white neighbor, Stevensville;. However, if you live in Benton Harbor, 67 is the average life expectancy. Across the board, the gap between rich and poor is 15 years nationwide.
Ansell calls this phenomenon "the death gap," which is driven by access to healthcare, as well as structural racism that's often built into policymaking, particularly at the local level -- where the gaps are most glaring, he asserts. Those phenomenons have led to death gaps between rich and poor of four (Ireland), eight (Great Britain) and 30 years (Michigan). "Now, every developed country has a gap, but no country has a gap like the United States," he says.
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Of course, such concerns are hardly new. People have bandied them about endlessly since the 1980s, when "trickle down" economics and flat wages became, with rather few resceptions, deeply embedded instruments of public policy. However, all this wealth only seemed to flow largely in one direction, to an inner ring of elite overdogs, who wasted little time finding the best representatives that money could buy.
And they're not shy about the privileged cocoons they inhabit. Far from it, as this ever-so-tasteful anecdote from Business Insider's November 12017 interview with billionaire Sean Parker suggests:
"So ... I'm going to be like 160 and I'm going to be part of this, like, class of immortal overlords. [Laughter] Because, you know the [Warren Buffett] expression about compound interest. ... Give us billionaires an extra hundred years and you'll know what ... wealth disparity looks like."
Sensitive, isn't he? With more than a whiff of moral bankruptcy to boot. If Satan does exist, and he's up for crafting a special air-conditioned room -- well, I've got a fair idea of his first candidate. Let's leave it at that. You can read the whole nauseating business for yourself below. Enough said there.
Even so, it's interesting that Facebook's first president has a qualm or two about letting his kiddos consume the offerings of a social media conglomerate that hungers 24/7 to exploit their time and attention ("God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains").
Guess that makes him a trifle hypocritical, too, so...well, once you finish selling your soul, you may well as tick all the wrong boxes, right? It's like Jays Potato Chips: you can't stop with just one (sellout), right?
Of course, there's a school of thought that suggests we're silly to get so upset. Sean Parker only spouts publicly what people like him intone, mantra-like, behind closed doors, and hey, who cares? He's only a billionaire, so why would anybody believe him, anyway? No harm, no foul. It's all good, right?
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But here's the problem with that logic. As Ansell's presentation clear, if we don't undo all those corrosive practices that shorten an average person's life -- whether it's credit checks to get a job, or restricting their living spaces to the neighborhoods, or making insurance conditional, at best -- we'll slide ever further back into the pre-New Deal dark ages. Or, as Ansell observers, "What we tolerate, we promote. So, if you tolerate unsafe conditions, we're promoting unsafe conditions."
You can assign whatever metrics to the problem you wish. One nugget that stands out from the Business Insider article is this one: in 2016, annual healthcare costs reached $10,345 per person. Plugging that back into Ansell's Twin Cities example, that figure chews up about 3 percent and 54 percent, respectively, of a person's average income in St. Joseph ($34,985), and Benton Harbor ($18,962).
Granted, Michigan was one of the few Republican-led states to expand Medicaid to its most vulnerable citizens, though time will tell how many actually keep their coverage, once those long-threatened work requirements kick in. In the end, though, it's fair to say that healthcare issues are often a question of numbers. Review the above statistics, again, if you wish, and watch Ansell's presentation. Then ask yourself: "Who really comes out ahead here?" If that doesn't rally people after the Democrats' midterm successes, nothing will. --The Reckoner
Links To Go (Hurry, Hurry,
Before Your Medicaid Evaporates):
(Cut 'n' paste in your browser, if needed):
Business Insider
Dr. David Ansell:
How Inequality Kills:
Health Systems & Health Equity:
Ex-Facebook President
And Billionaire Sean Parker Reveals...
