A few months ago, I made an appointment at the low-income clinic to see their therapist. I was hoping to find someone to listen to me – so I could hear my own voice better. The nurse practitioner suggested this as an option since I don’t make much money teaching part time. When I arrived, […]
health care
Trump’s First Year: Did the Working-Class Benefit?
Donald Trump ran for president on a populist and inclusionary platform. As he campaigned across the country, he appealed to increasingly larger numbers of Americans who felt forgotten by the country’s policies and politicians. Despite the fact that he lost the popular vote by three million, there’s no doubt that he tapped into the visceral […]
Cross Class Dialogue Circle
It was on a bulletin at a local coffee shop, Cross Class Dialogue Circle. What did those words mean? Cross made me think of the patterns on top of a pie. Class, I thought I knew what that was: divisions based on wealth and a word I always flinched at for some reason. Dialogue, easy: a […]
When Skinny Isn’t So Cute
Growing up as the daughter of a farm worker, we often had dinners of biscuits and milk gravy. I always thought I was having a great meal! While we did grow a lot of vegetables and canned as many as possible, we often ran out before the next season. Sometime there would be a little […]
All Bodies Are Beach Bodies
Each year, as the chill of winter is thrown off by the warmth of spring and summer, we are inundated with advertisements on television or magazines, along with conversations in school or at work, all asking the same question: Do you have a beach body? The beach body is largely conceived of as a body […]
Mental Health Diagnoses
Through a Classist Lens
Many people believe that you’re born with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). As a person who has been diagnosed with ADHD myself and treated with Ritalin for years, I started doubting whether ADHD is really a biological-neurological disorder. For those who don’t know the disease, people suffering from this disorder have difficulty with memory and concentration, […]
Class, Money and Mental Health
When I was in high school, I knew something was wrong with me. There were many days where I felt like I had lost all purpose in living. I remember crying a lot in my high school years. My chest would feel tight, the air would get thick, and my mind would race with negative […]
Health Equity: What’s Working
We have lots of ways to measure what’s not working in the United States. We can quickly pull the latest numbers that track growing inequalities in wealth and opportunity in our society, from displacement driven by gentrification and mounting student debt to low social mobility and gaping health disparities across lines of class and race. […]
Health doesn’t come cheap
Healthcare in this country is not meant for those who are sick. If you’re in good health, you are credited for that good health. The models in ads for health insurance and pharmaceuticals are smiling. All of them, pictured with good teeth, shiny and white, of course. You’re viewed as deserving, as lucky, as having […]
White People with Money: Class, Free Markets & Race in Medicine
Medical ethics state that everyone be treated equally, but the pressures of the free market and individual prejudices often bend that ethic. [gdlr_quote align=”right” ]The medical students and physicians in training quickly noted the majority of patients are white and wealthy and nicknamed it the “Center for Caucasians and Donors”[/gdlr_quote] Part of the problem is […]
Health Inequities: Black Lives Matter!
Zip code is the best predictor of how healthy a person is and will be. Why is there a zip line to health? Your zip code is determined by income and wealth – and the racialized public policies and practices over generations that herded people of color into neighborhoods that were underserved by design, and […]
Health and Cost-savings through Class Privilege and Contacts
Recently our family had an experience of cheaper and easier health care, because of the people that we know and our current financial status. My 19-year-old son was diagnosed with an eye condition, kerataconus, that was causing his eyesight to degrade. His eye doctor recommended that he get surgery – but the surgery wasn’t FDA-approved, […]
Class Inequality and Transgender Communities
Transgender issues have received more sympathetic media attention in the past few months than ever before. While so many people are paying attention to trans issues for the first time, this seems like an important moment to draw attention to an issue that’s at the heart of many of the challenges trans* people face in […]
WANTED: Hospitals That Fully Serve Their Communities
What happens to a poor, working class rural community when its hospital closes — with three days notice? That’s what residents of North Adams, Massachusetts and surrounding towns have been trying to figure out since the North Adams Regional Hospital closed its doors on March 28th. While local and state politicians scurried to at least […]
Labor’s Love Lost Over Obamacare?
Like many labor negotiators, I looked to health care reform for legislative relief from endless haggling with management over employee benefit costs. My own union and others worked hard for passage of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) three years ago. Despite its failure to take health insurance issues off the bargaining table, as a […]
It’s not only the rich who carry out classism
Should the one percent be exclusively blamed for creating our stratified society? Occupy Wall Street came, and to some degree, has gone. Like many professional middle class progressive movements, its main focus has been on inequality between the owning class and everyone else. However, is the 1 percent owning class completely guilty for the stratification […]
Crossing the Gap in 5 Minutes
How can a physician easily work with the poor and earn their respect, trust, and affection? The key is feeling genuine respect. I have worked with urban poor, working class, and underserved rural patients now for 30 years. What jumps out at me is how everyone incorporates their place in the US class system and then acts […]
To Care or Not to Care About Obamacare
When the Supreme Court approved “Obamacare,” most of my Facebook friends had joyful statuses about the ruling. And it is something to cheer about: millions of Americans will now be able to be insured; women will now have access to affordable birth control and not face gender pricing of insurance; and people cannot be denied […]
Poverty and Disability: the Vicious Circle
I first started to look at disability as a class issue when 18 of our members from Piedmont Peace Project and I attended a national peace movement conference in Atlanta. Six of us were disabled and three in wheelchairs, including me. No other group had visibly disabled people present, although I’m sure some hidden disabilities […]
Verizon Strike: A Teachable Moment?
Why Health Care Strikes Should Demand “Health Care For All,” Not Just “Hands Off My ‘Middle Class’ Benefits” For two weeks in August, thousands of Verizon strikers provided an inspiring display of picket-line militancy and resistance to contract concessions. From Massachusetts to Virginia, members of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood […]
