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Health discrimination
Michelle Mello, Professor of Law and Public Health, on whether insurers and employers can discriminate against people on the basis of personal health behaviors. (September 2008, 11:57) Please click the player icon above to play this podcast in…
A simple checklist that saves lives
[ Fall 2008 ] Fighter pilots use checklists to avoid deadly errors. Why not surgeons, too? So complex was the new B-17 bomber introduced during World War II that a star aviator crashed the mighty aircraft during its demonstration flight.…
Health insurance and Uncle Sam
[ Fall 2008 ] A proposal to make health care more affordable Though we Americans bicker about how best to fix our health care system, on this, most agree: The system is fundamentally unfair and fails to deliver good value…
2008 Alumni Award of Merit winners
[ Fall 2008 ] Standouts in public health tend to view big problems as boulders that must be rolled uphill, however steep those hills might be. This year’s recipients of the Alumni Award of Merit have each approached serious health…
Guns and suicide: A fatal link
[ Spring 2008 ] In the United States, suicides outnumber homicides almost two to one. Perhaps the real tragedy behind suicide deaths—about 30,000 a year, one for every 45 attempts—is that so many could be prevented. Research shows that whether…
Community health champion
[ Spring 2008 ] Florida's First Surgeon General Takes her Message on the Road In 2007, more than a fifth of Florida's approximately 18 million residents lacked health insurance, and 23 percent were obese, according to America's Health Rankings, an…
Champion social and economic equality
If you want to narrow health inequities, be bold. The most practical action you can take is not narrow incrementalism, but to spark wide-reaching initiatives to reduce U.S. socioeconomic, racial/ethnic, and gender inequalities while also promoting public health.…
Support a Health Rights movement
Forty-four years after Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, egregious racial and ethnic inequities persist in health status and health care. As vigorously documented by the Institute of Medicine’s sentinel 2002 report, Unequal Treatment, the life-expectancy…
Desegregate our healthcare system
If we as a nation are truly committed to putting our legacy of racial segregation behind us, one place to begin is our health care system. While the reasons for lower health status for racial and ethnic minorities…
Extend a safety net to deserving immigrant families
Reforming both U.S. immigration law and our health care system have been key domestic issues in the 2008 presidential campaign. Yet there is little recognition of the fact that these two problems overlap. Immigrants in this country and…