Member-only story
Health Care Is Racist. Here’s What Needs to Change
As scholar Harriet Washington explains, it’s time to consider financial penalties for doctors who discriminate
As the data continues to show, Covid is wreaking disproportionately more havoc on Black, Latinx, and Native American communities in the U.S. A range of factors conspire to make this so — factors well understood by Harriet Washington, a medical ethics scholar and award-winning author of books such as A Terrible Thing to Waste, on the effects of environmental racism, and Medical Apartheid, on the history of medical experimentation on Black Americans.
GEN caught up with Washington to discuss the structural reasons for the virus’s unequal lethality, and what changes can be put into place to make health outcomes in the U.S. more equitable.
GEN: CDC data is now showing that Black Americans are three times as likely to contract Covid as whites, and twice as likely to die from it. How does your research on environmental racism help explain this?
Washington: I’m happy to address that because there’s a profound synergy here. First, there are the usual suspects. We know that African Americans are less likely to have a personal physician. We know that too often, they have to rely upon local emergency departments. We also know that there have been a lot of hospital closures in the areas where we live, which removes even that safety net. When African Americans do get medical care, that medical care is substandard compared to that given to white Americans. We also know that they’re less likely to have health insurance, and even should they be insured, they’re less likely to have jobs which will allow them to take time off to see the doctor.
But the thing that I think people maybe don’t realize is that environmental racism causes diseases and vulnerabilities, every single one of which is a risk factor for coronavirus. We know that air pollution causes lung ailments, and it exacerbates and causes asthma, which is a risk factor for coronavirus, but it also causes kidney disease and heart disease, both of which are risk factors for coronavirus. Lead poisoning is related to increased vulnerability to a lot of viral assaults.
