Place, Not Race, May Better Explain America's Health Disparities

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2011/10/health-disparities/268/

National statistics routinely show almost shocking health disparities between white and minority populations in the U.S. Nationally, African Americans have higher rates of obesity, heart disease, hypertension and certain cancers, a pattern public health officials have struggled to understand and reverse (and that, in fact, has been a major focus of health initiatives under the Obama Administration).

“When I talk to people who are not in the health profession, people talk about why would there be racial disparities,” says Thomas LaVeist, who directs the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions. “People would say things like ‘it’s really an access-to-care issue,’ or there is this idea that there’s some kind of genetic effect, that black people are just genetically different from white people, and it’s producing these differences.

“But when you study the topic," LaVeist says, none of those theories make any sense.”

When LaVeist first began researching this 20 years ago, he began to develop a theory that health disparities may actually have more to do with segregation – with the characteristics of the communities in which people live, not with anything intrinsic in their racial differences. Now he’s published a new study in the journal Health Affairs that lends even more support to this idea. Health disparities, the new research suggests, aren’t really about race at all. They’re about place.

[valerief]

1. Location, location, location. nt

[TheMadMonk]

2. Given how America kettles it's blacks and Hispanics, "PLACE"...

...makes his findings even more of an indictment on White America.

And while race may not be medically the reason, for health disparity, it very clearly is the political reason: Darkies and wetbacks, clearly don't deserve the same care as "real (white) people".

[w8liftinglady]

3. The two tend to go together in Texas

Needless to say,communities with a higher mean income have better health facillities and more insured.The communities, at least here in Texas, have their subtle ways of limiting racial and ethnic residents.