A Deadly Lack of Access to Healthcare

A small but important success story is emerging from tales of stimulus spending: $500,000 of $2.5B allocated is already in use expanding health clinic access for poor and/or rural communities.  The article contrasts homeless teens receiving dental care post-stimulus with the tragedy of a young man who died from an infected tooth that required only an $80 extraction, which he could not afford.

Unfortunately, these kids need to pack in as much care as they can as this $2.5b comes down, because it's a one-time infusion for our health clinic "system".  By 2025, rural and poor areas should suffer from a shortage of doctors exceeding 150,000.  Combined with "the drag of poverty" on these communities, it's perhaps not as much of a surprise, though shocking and horrifying still, that there is such disparate healthcare outcomes across the country:

While far fewer black babies were born [in Palm Beach County, FL], a greater percentage of black mothers lost babies in the womb. That's a loss of 16 of 1,000 black babies, as opposed to 7.3 per 1,000 white babies and 13.8 per 1,000 babies of all other races combined, including Hispanics.

Some younger mothers are losing their babies after rough sex, fights, and overly physical play. Other mothers battle depression, diabetes, high blood pressure, and weight. Compounding those factors are the drag of poverty: a distrust of doctors; a lack of education, foresight and proper nutrition.

When I write "lack of access" in the title of this post, I mean all these additional compounding factors.  Consider the Palm Beach case.   For a variety of reasons, there aren't doctors within easy reach of your house or school.  In school, there's no money for additional programs like health education, a nurse who's regularly on-site, or even parenting classes, like my middle-class high school offered.  There's no spare money or time in your house for any kind of routine healthcare, exacerbating any risk of disease.  In this environment of circumscribed life chances, there's a normalcy to having kids young, pursuing the perceived satisfaction and conferring of adulthood for women that comes from bearing children.  Yet, these moms and their kids are coming of age in a hostile environment that fails to provide respectable, decent access to the care and training we should minimally provide as a society.

So let's celebrate the $2.5B and the people that will benefit from it - exponentially, no doubt - in the next 24 months.  But let's not rest for a second in fighting for better access to healthcare for everyone across the board.

(Apologies if I've used this photo before; it looks familiar.  Photo of a mobile health clinic in post-Katrina New Orleans, by Editor B)