Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2023 -

Black Lives Matter and the COVID-19 pandemic brought structural racism into the mainstream of public discourse; its effects have long been understood in public health. Like structural inequality based on socioeconomic status, structural racism causes inequities in education, employment, income, housing, and the criminal justice system, profoundly affecting people's health. People of color in the US confront racism every day. Along with inequities within the health care system, racism produces differentials in access, care, and outcomes. Matthew (George Washington Univ. Law School) argues that health inequities are a social construction: the racial differences in health outcomes, especially morbidity and mortality, are the results not of genetic differences between races--themselves a social construct--but of socially determined differences in the distribution of power and resources, thus aligning with the understanding that more genetic difference separates members of a single "race" than different racial populations. An attorney, Matthew argues that the legal system contributes to reproducing structural inequality, while also contending that it can be leveraged to produce different outcomes. But legal revolution, though necessary, is not sufficient. Matthew points to examples of successful population-level interventions in housing, food security, education, and neighborhood violence, illustrating the alliance between health care and legal professionals that could result in producing "just health."Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

Nuila (Baylor College of Medicine) combines vivid, moving portraits of his patients at Ben Taub Hospital--a public safety-net hospital set amid the facilities of the Texas Medical Center, a large multi-hospital complex in Houston, Texas--with a searing analysis of US health care's economics, organization, and politicalization. This book's most important contribution is its combination of stories of particular people, whom Nuila describes in all their religious, economic, racial, and immigration status diversity, with the author's descriptions of how those statuses influenced those individuals' ability to receive medical care. Nuila contrasts Ben Taub's public mission with what he calls "Medicine Inc."--the health-care system dominated by private insurance, and most hospitals, including nonprofits, that focus on patients' ability to pay and on squeezing profits from all possible sources, despite the fact that there are probably more good people working in those hospitals than he sometimes admits. Nuila's ability to combine literary prose, policy analysis, and moving narrative make this book an accessible, and at times tragic, view into the power and inequality rife within the US medical system. This author's considerable narrative powers add helpful nuance, making his passionate call for health care reform more persuasive.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.