our daughter attended med school and did her residency at an inner city hospital and saw many of the same problems with people coming to the clinic and not being able to follow through with the medical attention they needed. Poverty and education play a large role in people's health and we need to try and break that cycle by offering more support.
Keep caring and thank you!
From your post ...
"... It's also the reason I strongly support Sanders as I truly believe in my heart of hearts and know as a physician who deals with the ravages of poverty and an anti-working class rigged system every day that economic issues are fundamental to everyone's well being especially when it comes to African Americans and their health and their lives.
As the original Clinton campaign used to say "It's the economy, stupid". It was true then and it is true now.
I could go on and on how poverty disables, maims, and kills. That is for another post but the stats are easy to find. Just google leading causes of death of Americans in general and then various groups of people. It may not be as sensational as some of the horrible cases we have had to witness in the news but impoverishment is a slow persistent degradation of the soul, the mind, and the body.
Yes we can work on specific things to correct institutional and non-institutional racism in this country and I think all of the three main candidates are becoming wise to addressing this more overtly. But fundamentally, under it all, many of us truly do believe the fundamental problem for everyone, especially African Americans, is an economic one. Even so, this is not an either-or set of solutions, we can work on all fronts.
We can certainly have a debate about how to do that and I would like to. But it doesn't seem as if it would be a fair debate because it feels like the moment you don't overtly and categorically disregard the economic issue as being fundamental to everyone's plight, then you are plagued with the implied meme that you are not really "getting it" or you are not really "racially sensitive" to what's going on. And this is the last thing you want to have applied to you on a left leaning forum board.
But here's the thing, many of us really do feel the underpinning problems are economic, environmental, and campaign finance related. We feel that correcting these things would create a better playing field for everyone, especially the African American community..."
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