Our newspaper is trying to expand its health coverage. This might be a Good Thing if it were clearer what is meant by this. At the moment, I'm skeptical.
Like most newspapers, we run the wire stories every Thursday on the most noteworthy articles from the medical journals. And we run lots of puffery on the latest diet fads (Atkins is a boon for pork rind producers!). Beyond that, most of what we run has to do with prevention.
Nothing wrong with that, mind you. Prevention stories are important, even if they all tend to sound the same — eat right, exercise, avoid carcinogens, wear sunscreen, get a good night's sleep, yada yada.
But prevention is only a part of the health care picture. And for most American households, it is not the most important part.
The most important aspect of health care, for most of us, is access. For many of us, that access is complicated and restricted by the HMOs and PPOs that provide our health insurance. And those of us with HMOs and PPOs are the lucky ones. Millions of households have no insurance at all.
"Consult a doctor if symptoms persist," the labels say. Good advice, if you can afford to follow it. Many can't.
Access to health care in America has everything to do with employment, income and class. To cover health care while pretending that income doesn't matter and class doesn't exist is dishonest, inaccurate and insulting.
Last week our paper ran a well-intentioned, prevention-focused piece on skin cancer. The main thrust of the article was to counter the myth that darker-skinned people are immune to melanoma.
The article provides a platform for Dr. Susan C. Taylor, "director of the Skin of Color Center in New York," who is a passionate advocate for the use of sunscreen by African Americans. Dr. Taylor is worth hearing on this subject and providing her with such a platform is a Good Thing.
But, like so much prevention-focused newspaper reporting on health care, the article ignores the role played by income and class, and so it spins off into absurdity that borders on the offensive.
But African-Americans can get melanoma, Taylor said. And perhaps because of the myth that they can't get it and the failure to detect the disease earlier, African Americans have a lower survival rate than do Caucasians, about 60 percent compared with about 85 percent.
The myth needs to be countered, and it may contribute a bit to the lower survival rate for black Americans, but here the reporter is ignoring the elephant in the living room.
"African Americans have a lower survival rate than do Caucasians" for almost all cancers. And that fact has nothing to do with "psychosocial" myths about sunscreen.
The article goes on to speculate at length about other possible factors contributing to the lower survival rates from melanoma for black Americans, but nowhere does it consider the possibility that income and class have anything to do with it. The open secret that white people have better odds of getting decent health care in this country than black people do never enters the discussion. African Americans have a life expectancy that's years lower than that of white Americans.
It's not about sunscreen. It's about money.
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