Let’s commit to elminate health disparities

With the month of April arriving on Tuesday, and as we celebrate April as National Minority Health Month, we must also continue to call for a national will to provide every individual adequate health care services as a matter of right, especially our children who all deserve a healthy start in life.

Historically, health inequality has been part of the American social landscape for nearly as long as we’ve been a nation. To help us all better understand the origin of health inequality, maybe, except for the American Indians, Black Americans, since arriving as slaves, have had the worst health care, the worst health status, and the worst health outcomes of any racial or ethnic group in the U.S.

In North Carolina for instance, health care for the vast majority of Blacks began on the plantation. When it came to food, shelter, clothing, and medical care, the enslaved Blacks were subject to the control and whim of the enslaver.

According to historian Kenneth M. Stampp’s “The Peculiar Institution,” a book that covered every aspect of slavery, on a North Carolina plantation during the 1850s, 67 percent of the Black infants died. Today in North Carolina and across the nation, Blacks still have a higher rate of infant mortality, just one example of the lingering disparities in health status between Blacks and Whites.

Due to the passage of NC’s Medicaid expansion law, about 600,000 North Carolinians, with many right here in Sampson County, will be covered through the expanded Medicaid program, giving them health care access to treatable and preventable health conditions. While signing the Medicaid expansion measure, the then Gov. Roy Cooper attested, “This law, once implemented, will be the working families bill of the decade.” That was truly a milestone event, causing the governor to further add, “Today is a historic step toward a healthier North Carolina.”

So, “advancing commitments to eliminate health disparities” is indeed, a wonderful way to usher in National Minority Health Month for 2025. And let’s not forget that the history of National Minority Health Month can be traced back to Booker T. Washington, a former slave, the founder of Tuskegee Institute, now known as Tuskegee University and leader in the cause of industrial education for Blacks following emancipation.

In attempting to alert the country on the national stage about the poor health status of Black Americans in 1915, Washington, being astutely aware of the disproportionately high death rate among Blacks, launched the first National Negro Health Week. He proclaimed, “The future of the (Black) race depends upon the conservation of its health.”

Between the start of the National Negro Health Week in 1915 and the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) of 2010, the Office of Minority Health was launched in 1985, to bring attention to the nation’s health disparities. In the words of Dr. King, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.”