“This deeply hurts all of us and is our collective agenda as a nation,” said Marcella Dean, Associate Dean of Health Equity Studies at Yale University and co-author of the study on Excess Mortality and Mortality. Nunes Smith said. Years of life lost. “Everything is possible. Who among the people who lost their lives was heading towards the scientific discoveries that would transform our entire lives and create beautiful art and music? Who will be the spiritual or religious leader? Not to mention the economic impact.”
A report published Tuesday in the influential medical journal JAMA found that while the reasons for excess mortality and associated economic losses vary, including mass incarceration, the root is the same: inequality in the structure of American society. It is said that
That includes access to quality schools, living wage jobs, housing in safe neighborhoods, health insurance and medical care, all of which affect health and well-being. For centuries, blacks have been legally deprived of these benefits, and researchers say the effects have yet to be fully remedied.
“To illustrate the issue, one of the most glaring examples of structural racism was in 1935 when the Social Security Act was passed,” said Dean of Tulane University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, who was involved in the study. said Thomas Laveist, lead author of Economic impact of health inequalities. “They deliberately excluded black domestic and farm workers disproportionately. It’s not fully figured out.”
And the short life expectancy of black Americans means they don’t get the return on their Social Security investments. A person born in 1960 can start receiving full Social Security benefits at age 67, According to the Centers for Disease Control and Preventionblack man born in the year Life expectancy was only 61 years.
Not only is the person paying for a system that doesn’t benefit enough, but society is also at a loss “because the person is not part of the economy,” Laveiste said. . “We paid for this man’s school, but he got a job, paid taxes, and died prematurely.
That costs a lot of dollars in military readiness and employee fitness.
The researchers found that if someone died prematurely, or had to pay out-of-pocket or third-party payments to health care providers for emergency room visits, ambulance service, vision or dental care, health impairment would increase. We explored the economic burden caused by equality.
They also calculated the economic damage if they or their relatives were unable to work due to illness. Or when an employee shows up for work but isn’t feeling well and is less productive.
The researchers extended their analysis to a wider population and concluded that failure to achieve health equity cost the nation $1.3 trillion in 2018. This price tag includes the burden experienced by her 25+ US adults without a college degree, as well as Native Americans, Asians, Blacks, Latinos and Pacific Islanders.
More than two-thirds of the economic burden experienced by communities of color is due to premature deaths, and most of those premature deaths are due to black communities. On the other hand, “the cost of premature death was zero for adults who graduated from a four-year college,” says the report.
For nearly 40 years, a flurry of research has begun examining various health conditions in the black community. By referencing the groundbreaking study on black and minority health that came to be known asheckler reportwas written by Margaret Heckler when she was Secretary of Health to President Ronald Reagan. Two studies released Tuesday were no exception to citing that report, but a clear call to the public to attribute 60,000 excess deaths annually to health inequalities.
“This isn’t just a 1985 report, it goes back 124 years to The Philadelphia Negro, the first ethnography to outline the problems facing the black community,” said researcher Darrell Hudson. said Mr. Health disparities at Washington University in St. Louis. “This result is nothing new. Our understanding of mechanisms, policies and practices has evolved.”
In the decades since, modern medicine has witnessed major scientific discoveries and technological advances, but those advances have not benefited everyone equally. Researchers put together a report released Tuesday to dispel some myths about how society did or didn’t respond to the alarms sounded more than a generation ago. He said he did.
“We tend to have this idea as time goes on. We’re improving all the time,” says Jessica Owens, an assistant professor in the American University School of Health who studies health equity. Young says. But “as we continue to innovate, we can’t always assume that it will promote and protect people’s health,” she said.
Nunez Smith, who chaired President Biden’s COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force, said the report on excess mortality found that the root causes of racial health disparities were “biological.” He said he would dispel the idea that it reflects “some decisive factor”.
Nuniz-Smith and other researchers studied the period 1999–2020 to reach conclusions about excess mortality, the number of deaths observed versus the number of deaths expected given the same mortality rates for blacks and whites. Analyzed death certificates up to
Between 1999 and the early 2010s, the excess mortality gap narrowed, falling by about 48% for black men and about 61% for black women compared to whites, according to the report. But then progress plateaued, and the excess burden of death stubbornly remained, ballooning into 2020.
Excess mortality in the first year of coronavirus The scale of the pandemic surpassed the previous year studied, according to the report.
Along with adults over the age of 50, infants bear the brunt of excess mortality and lost lives, according to the report. The gender disparity in mortality has widened sharply.
Studies show that the leading causes of excess mortality and years of life lost include infant mortality, heart disease, and cancer.
“These findings show that current efforts to curb or close mortality disparities have had little effect and any progress is fragile,” the report concluded.
Harlan Krumholtz, a cardiologist at Yale University School of Medicine and a co-author of the excess mortality study, said the numbers say something else, acknowledging “where we’re failing and the magnitude of the problem.” said there was a growing need to
“Why not accept that this is really racism as a cause of death?” asked Krumholtz. “Is there any other health problem that has caused such a loss?”
The study showed that black men had the highest excess mortality and years of life lost, except for ages 1 to 10, according to Derek Derek, director of the Center for Men’s Health and Equity, Georgetown University Institute for Racial Justice. Griffiths said the results were supportive. The need to “examine how anti-black racism is gendered and use that as a basis for how we need to intervene.”
Griffiths said the report referred to “systemic racism” but said it was too blatant a means. Anti-black racism manifests itself as stereotypes and tropes. It’s that cultural narrative that shapes why it’s okay for us to have these patterns. ”
Many of these stereotypes are viewed through the lens of gender, he says.
Studies show that black boys are often seen as older, stronger, and less naive than their peers. Black men are seen as criminals and intellectually inferior “homeless fathers.” Black women are turned into racist caricatures of lust, aggression, and “welfare queens.”
“We tend not to think precisely enough about the structural factors of racial inequality,” says Griffiths. “I often feel uncomfortable” talking about black men’s poor health, he said. We try to address this as a racial pattern without dealing with a gender pattern. ”
These differences are evident in the way men socialize to deal with stress and health. Researchers also say that while many government and health programs tend to be aimed at helping single mothers, similar services are not available to men or single fathers.
“Over time, we’ve learned that socioeconomic status doesn’t hold up as well as other people,” said Hudson of the University of Washington. reported being discriminated against by
Blacks often have to cross boundaries to seek aspirations and move across predominantly white territory to get an education, earn a living, get a loan, and raise children. Hudson said it can be caustic if someone is constantly crossing boundaries, because that person is either experiencing or anticipating stress all the time.
Stress is a physiological response and is built-in. At the first sign of danger, the brain raises an alarm, triggering a torrent of neural and hormonal signals flooding the bloodstream. Excessive exposure to these hormones wears down the body, causing “weather” that exacerbates disease and accelerates aging.
Although weathering is not racially specific, it is thought to hit blacks particularly hard because of the inherent constant stress caused by racism.Studies show that blacks much higher rates Hypertension, obesity, diabetes and stroke are more common than whites, and whites develop these chronic diseases up to 10 years earlier.
“Our bodies aren’t sophisticated enough to discern that this isn’t a savannah lion, but someone just looking at you amused,” Hudson said, calling it “Costs associated with increased social mobility”
But there are reasons for hope. It can be found during the coronavirus pandemic when the mortality gap between blacks and whites began to shrink and even reverse. According to the CDC, life expectancy for whites will have the second largest decline in 2021, dropping by a full year, compared with 0.7 years for blacks.
“So why did that happen?” asked Reed Tuxon, co-founder of the Black Coalition Against COVID-19. He said there are two reasons. “One of these, of course, was the destructive messages emanating from many white political leaders, but also the mobilization of black faiths and community-based, social and fraternal organizations. “
Physician and former Washington, D.C. public health commissioner, Tuxon said the black community’s hard work to “fight for their lives” despite scarce resources will help the federal government “create sustainable and predictable health care.” It just shows that the time to find a way has passed.” We provide significant funding to support black communities and their organizations. ”
“We proved that you can keep up even if you race with an anvil on your back,” he said.
