Diversity Matters
A free public service for a better community - look up Yokai
Happy Monday Healthcare Advocates
I would like to encourage comments and suggestions from you if you have time. If there is a special topic you’d like to see please let me know. Please use the comment button below. One of the topics I’m investigating has to do with long term care and what oversight exists.
Diversity Matters
Last week we discussed maternal and infant mortality and how it is related to race in the US. We found three things: 1) Women are not heard well by doctors, 2) Black maternal and infant mortality improves when the doctor is also Black (20 year study in Florida) and 3) social determinants of health matter.
I was perusing the JAMA Open magazine today and came across a couple of articles about the recent Supreme Court decision to strike down diversity as a component of admissions, especially for medical school. Here are the links to the articles: Adashi et al and Rice et al.
The Supreme Court decision that we are color blind is just not accurate. If everything were really colorblind then it would be reasonable to expect that since Black people are 13% of the population then 13% of the doctors would be Black - but they are not. They’re about 5%. (For those math people out there, the population of the US is sufficiently large for Law of Large Numbers to come int play).
Remember the Florida study on maternal health? Without a diverse healthcare population the health of our nation will suffer.
The situation is not as bleak as it might be, though. Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, that colleges and universities can “continue to consider socioeconomic diversity and to recruit and enroll students who are first-generation college applicants or who speak multiple languages, for example.”
The University of California Davis School of Medicine has used “the socioeconomic disadvantage scale,” which is race and ethnicity neutral, to achieve higher enrollments of Black and Hispanic student populations (link). The scale boosts students based on the level of disadvantage their family has faced.
The Morehouse School of Medicine uses a holistic admissions process to admit students who are aligned with they mission and considers grade point average and MCAT score as only 2 of 10 admission criteria. Their technique seems to do a good job of picking students that other schools would quickly pass over, and yet their enrollees have a high level of passing the medical boards and becoming doctors. It seems like a page out of “Moneyball”. Moneyball was the story of how one baseball team hired a mathematician to determine what metrics really matter instead of the ones that everyone else used.
Still the Supreme Court has made it harder all around by denying that racial disparity exists. That’s just not borne out by facts and data here on Earth One.
Find My Elected Officials
Contact the White House https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/
Contact State and Federal Representatives
https://www.commoncause.org/find-your-representative/addr/
Important Healthcare Resources
League of Women Voters Healthcare Reform Toolkit
Our Newsletter resources including reproductive healthcare
Healthcare Advocacy Reading List
Organizations to Contact
National Nurses United Medicare4All
Physicians for a National Health Plan
Reproductive Health
NARAL - Pro Choice America
Planned Parenthood
Miscarriage and Abortion Hotline has references about where to procure abortion medications. They also assist women in the process of self managed abortion or miscarriage by phone or text and will respond in an hour. Details and hours of operation at their website.
United State of Women Reproductive health page (bottom of the page) has important resources such as medical support, access to Telehealth, prescriptions by mail, and legal support references.
Practice careful communications - The Digital Defense Fund has a number of tips to keep texts, calls, and internet use private. Here is their site.
If you need financial help with an abortion try abortionfunds.org
Claims Denials and Appeals & What to Do
Appeal a Healthcare Decision
Appeal/Negotiate a Hospital Bill
Save Democracy
Chop Wood, Carry Water by Jessica Cravens
RESISTBOT
Link to the RESISTBOT site to learn more
Link to Chop Wood, Carry Water Resistbot write up