Health Care Is Long Overdue for a Social Justice Reckoning

Health Care Is Long Overdue for a Social Justice Reckoning

3 years ago
Anonymous $qOHwDUKgAF

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/health-care-is-long-overdue-for-a-social-justice-reckoning/

With protesters in many American cities marching for justice, and with the Supreme Court delivering a historic ruling protecting gay and transgender workers from workplace discrimination, this summer is shaping up to be a watershed moment for equality in America. But while much of our national conversation is focused on urgent issues like police brutality, it’s time we acknowledged that American health care, too, is long overdue for a reckoning with systemic forms of discrimination that have a detrimental effect on the health and well-being of tens of millions of American women.


Take, for example, heart disease. It’s the leading cause of death among women—but a 2012 survey conducted by the American Heart Association (AHA) found that 44 percent of women were unaware of this, with the highest percentages of unawareness among Blacks and Latinas. Why this discrepancy? Why are so many women more concerned with, say, breast cancer than they are with heart disease, a condition that kills six times as many women each year?