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Full-Text Articles in Law
Disparities In Health Care: The Pandemic’S Lessons For Health Lawyers, Danielle Pelfrey Duryea, Nicole Huberfeld, Ruqaiijah Yearby
Disparities In Health Care: The Pandemic’S Lessons For Health Lawyers, Danielle Pelfrey Duryea, Nicole Huberfeld, Ruqaiijah Yearby
All Faculty Scholarship
Population-level disparities in health and health care came to the forefront of U.S. public consciousness in 2020. As the racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic stratification of COVID-19 infection and death rates emerged with chilling clarity, the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer focused millions of Americans on the complex, structural nature of inequity and its long-lasting effects.
Access to quality health care is a “social determinant of health,” meaning that it is one of the “non-medical factors that influence health outcomes . . . the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, and the wider set …
Ending The War On People With Substance Use Disorders In Health Care, Kelly K. Dineen, Elizabeth Pendo
Ending The War On People With Substance Use Disorders In Health Care, Kelly K. Dineen, Elizabeth Pendo
All Faculty Scholarship
Earp et al. (2021) provide a robust justification for the decriminalization of drugs based on the systemic racism that fuels the “war on drugs” and the ongoing harms of drug policies to individuals. The authors’ call for decriminalization is a necessary but insufficient step in addressing the entrenched structural, institutional, and individual discrimination that leads to the inequitable and unjust treatment of people with substance use disorder (PWSUD). Nothing short of robust enforcement of existing legal protections and sweeping legal reforms in the regulation of addiction treatment, controlled substances, health care finance, and civil rights law will be adequate to …
Allocating Medicine Fairly In An Unfair Pandemic, Govind Persad
Allocating Medicine Fairly In An Unfair Pandemic, Govind Persad
Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship
America’s COVID-19 pandemic has both devastated and disparately harmed minority communities. How can the allocation of scarce treatments for COVID-19 and similar public health threats fairly and legally respond to these racial disparities? Some have proposed that members of racial groups who have been especially hard-hit by the pandemic should receive priority for scarce treatments. Others have worried that this prioritization misidentifies racial disparities as reflecting biological differences rather than structural racism, or that it will generate mistrust among groups who have previously been harmed by medical research. Still others complain that such prioritization would be fundamentally unjust. I argue …
Closing The Health Justice Gap: Access To Justice In Furtherance Of Health Equity, Yael Cannon
Closing The Health Justice Gap: Access To Justice In Furtherance Of Health Equity, Yael Cannon
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
A massive civil “justice gap” plagues the United States. Every day, low-income Americans—and disproportionately people of color—go without the legal information and representation they need to enforce their rights. This can cost them their homes, jobs, food security, or children. But unmet civil legal needs in housing, employment, and public benefits, for example, are not simply injustices—they are well-documented drivers of poor health, or social determinants of health. Those marginalized by virtue of both race and socioeconomic status are particularly harmed by inaccessibility to justice and also by chronic health conditions and lower life expectancy. When a tenant walks into …
Setting The Health Justice Agenda: Addressing Health Inequity & Injustice In The Post-Pandemic Clinic, Emily Benfer, James Bhandary-Alexander, Yael Cannon, Medha Makhlouf, Tomar Pierson-Brown
Setting The Health Justice Agenda: Addressing Health Inequity & Injustice In The Post-Pandemic Clinic, Emily Benfer, James Bhandary-Alexander, Yael Cannon, Medha Makhlouf, Tomar Pierson-Brown
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
The COVID-19 pandemic surfaced and deepened entrenched preexisting health injustice in the United States. Racialized, marginalized, poor, and hyper-exploited populations suffered disproportionately negative outcomes due to the pandemic. The structures that generate and sustain health inequity in the United States—including in access to justice, housing, health care, employment, and education—have produced predictably disparate results. The authors, law school clinicians and professors involved with medical-legal partnerships, discuss the lessons learned by employing a health justice framework in teaching students to address issues of health inequity during the pandemic. The goal of health justice is to eliminate health disparities that are linked …
When We Breathe: Re-Envisioning Safety And Justice In A Post-Floyd Era, Aya Gruber
When We Breathe: Re-Envisioning Safety And Justice In A Post-Floyd Era, Aya Gruber
Publications
10th Annual David H. Bodiker Lecture on Criminal Justice delivered on Wed., Oct. 21, 2020 at Ohio State University Moritz College of Law.
Prisons, Nursing Homes, And Medicaid: A Covid-19 Case Study In Health Injustice, Mary Crossley
Prisons, Nursing Homes, And Medicaid: A Covid-19 Case Study In Health Injustice, Mary Crossley
Articles
The unevenly distributed pain and suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic present a remarkable case study. Considering why the coronavirus has devastated some groups more than others offers a concrete example of abstract concepts like “structural discrimination” and “institutional racism,” an example measured in lives lost, families shattered, and unremitting anxiety. This essay highlights the experiences of Black people and disabled people, and how societal choices have caused them to experience the brunt of the pandemic. It focuses on prisons and nursing homes—institutions that emerged as COVID-19 hotspots –and on the Medicaid program.
Black and disabled people are disproportionately represented in …