March 3

Bottom line: I really learned quite a few interesting things from Dr. Otis Crawley's presentation. Granted, it was a little fatalistic in that his presentation focused a lot on the pitfalls of the system; but I think that this is an important way to start an informed debate on the issue. It was incredible to hear the different debates surrounding equitable provision of health care. Dr. Crawley made an interesting statement: that we need to consider "rational health care, not rationing health care". This concept was reinforced by a different point which he brought up: there is a difference between access to health care and quality of health care. What kind of information do underserved communities have access to and how does this affect the quality of the health care they receive? Additionally, the concept of "rationality" in distribution of access to health care was reinforced by a graph which Dr. Crawley presented. This graph was incredibly compelling because it essentially showed that a person with colon cancer (in the span of five years) is likely to live longer with stage two of the disease with insurance than a person with stage one of the disease without insurance. This is not only a presents a huge ethical problem, but also highlights the importance of rationality in the healthcare.

Another super interesting debate that we sort of continued amongst ourselves after the event includes the question of race and physiological distinctions/susceptibilities to certain disease. Many of people agreed that race in itself is a social construct which cannot be used to accurately characterize suceptibilities to disease. In terms of gathering demographic information about correlation with certain racial/ethnic groups and diseases, I can understand using racial categorizations (for statistical purposes). However, it seems slightly shady to me to claim that there is a causal pathway between race and disease.

Yeah.