Subprime Health
Debt and Race in U.S. Medicine
From race-based pharmaceutical prescriptions and marketing, to race-targeted medical “hot spotting” and the Affordable Care Act, to stem-cell trial recruitment discourse, Subprime Health is a timely examination of race-based medicine as it intersects with the concept of debt. Utilizing an interdisciplinary perspective, this volume moves the discussion beyond debates over racial genomics and suggests fruitful new directions for future research.
Subprime Health: Debt and Race in U.S. Medicine deftly bridges the space between these two words. Drawing on the rich knowledge of eight professors of sociology and cultural studies, this collection of essays perceptively examines the manifestation of race and racism in the American medical institution.
British Journal of Sports Medicine
From race-based pharmaceutical prescriptions and marketing, to race-targeted medical “hot spotting” and the Affordable Care Act, to stem-cell trial recruitment discourse, Subprime Health is a timely examination of race-based medicine as it intersects with the concept of debt.
The contributors to this volume propose that race-based medicine is inextricable from debt in two key senses. They first demonstrate how the financial costs related to race-based medicine disproportionately burden minorities, as well as how monetary debt and race are conditioned by broader relations of power. Second, the contributors investigate how race-based medicine is related to the concept of indebtedness and is often positioned as a way to pay back the debt that the medical establishment—and society at large—owes for the past and present neglect and abuses of many communities of color. By approaching the subject of race-based medicine from an interdisciplinary perspective—critical race studies, science and technology studies, public health, sociology, geography, and law—this volume moves the discussion beyond narrow and familiar debates over racial genomics and suggests fruitful new directions for future research.
Contributors: Ruha Benjamin, Princeton U; Catherine Bliss, U of California, San Francisco; Khiara M. Bridges, Boston U; Shiloh Krupar, Georgetown U; Jenna M. Loyd, U of Wisconsin–Milwaukee; Anne Pollock, Georgia Tech.
Subprime Health: Debt and Race in U.S. Medicine deftly bridges the space between these two words. Drawing on the rich knowledge of eight professors of sociology and cultural studies, this collection of essays perceptively examines the manifestation of race and racism in the American medical institution.
British Journal of Sports Medicine
Subprime Health documents how the race-based medicine reframes race as a biological phenomena that organizes medical knowledge and practice along racial lines, and in ways that are both historically situated and profoundly novel. Readers will leave informed of the history and practice of race-based medicine, and its significance to Black health and life in the United States.
Antipode
The authors provide unique insights into the delivery of care in the world’s best acute care system, revealing that ultimately, race does matter in the cost, access, and quality of care delivered in the US. The authors provide practical recommendations for professionals on how to treat each patient as an individual with unique medical conditions and health needs.
CHOICE
The focus on debt is the book’s most valuable contribution, holding significant potential for making sense of the uneven distributions of accountability that shape relations between selves and society across entrenched imbalances of power.
Somatosphere
This is a challenging piece that provides much needed attention to the multiple problems plaguing pharmacogenomics and its dalliance with the race concept.
Social History of Medicine
Contents
Introduction: Race-Based Medicine and the Specter of Debt
Nadine Ehlers and Leslie R. Hinkson
Part I: Race-Based Medicine and Monetary Debt
1. The High Cost of Having Hypertension while Black in America
Leslie R. Hinkson
2. “When Treating Patients Like Criminals Makes Sense”: Medical Hot Spotting, Race, and Debt
Nadine Ehlers and Shiloh Krupar
3. Obamacare and Sovereign Debt: Race, Reparations, and the Haunting of Premature Death
Jenna M. Loyd
4. BiDil’s Compensation Relations
Anne Pollock
Part II: Race-Based Medicine and Indebtedness
5. The Meaning of Health Disparities
Catherine Bliss
6. What Do We Owe Each Other? Moral Debts and Racial Distrust in Experimental Stem Cell Science
Ruha Benjamin and Leslie R. Hinkson
7. Lessons from Racial Medicine: The Group, the Individual, and the Equal Protection Clause
Khiara M. Bridges
Conclusion: Freedom from Debt?
Leslie R. Hinkson and Nadine Ehlers
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Index
