Why the health of black folks concerns us all
Posted By: Dr. Donald Suggs 
Date Posted: December 9th, 2009 Category: Health Care
The St. Louis American is a weekly newspaper covering issues of interest in the African American community. For more information, visit www.stlamerican.com.
I think it is a significant step in the right direction for a major health care system like BJC to initiate an interactive online forum such as this.
It is now widely recognized and often stated that to improve health outcomes – to make medicine better – will require input and action from everyone.
Much of the focus this year has been on members of Congress and their role in legislating new forms of health insurance. But the role of private health care providers, such as BJC, remains crucial. More and more, we also recognize that the public must take on a larger role in shaping their own health outcomes, through greater awareness and improved behavior.
And so an interactive website like this provides a new place for the public to meet BJC, a private health care provider, with that interaction available for consideration – and comment – by legislators and other stakeholders, should they choose to pay attention.
While I have your attention, I would like to ask readers of this forum to consider something we work on at The St. Louis American, the newspaper I serve as publisher. We are a weekly newspaper edited with the local African-American community in mind. We have a dedicated health editor and health reporter, who produce a special section, Your Health Matters, that appears twice monthly. Much of what we do in our health coverage centers on race-based health disparities. We focus on conditions that disproportionately affect African Americans and attempt to provide positive models for addressing these conditions, for helping black people to suffer less, have a higher quality of life and live longer.
Black people do experience higher rates of many debilitating illnesses and briefer life expectancies than is found in other demographics, but we do not wish to depress or alarm our readers with these facts – which, anyway, they already know, because they are simple, observable facts of life in their families and communities. Instead, we strive to empower our readers to take control of their own health and the health of those they love.
Though we mainly report on and to African Americans in St. Louis, we are proud of a diverse readership, as black people around the country follow us on our website and members of the wider community in St. Louis read us as well. While I have the attention of perhaps an even more diverse, more mainstream audience on this forum, I would like to offer a brief argument for why improving race-based disparities is an important goal for everyone, not only racial minorities.
Of course, we are becoming a more integrated community, and social media such as this are helping in this positive transformation. So it is increasingly true that non-black people now count black people as co-workers, friends, family members, elected leaders. As such, parity in health outcomes for African Americans becomes more of a direct personal concern for people of all backgrounds.
This multiracial interdependence also leaves the arena of fellow feeling to encompass structural questions of our public life, health and economics. Even without legislation providing for more widespread government-provided health care, our tax dollars already are paying for the health care of millions of low-income, disabled and elderly Americans. Given that black people combat economic disparities as surely as health disparities, a disproportionate number of low-income Americans are black. An improvement in their health outcomes as a demographic – that is, a reduction in race-based health disparities – would ease the burden on taxpayers of all backgrounds.
Large local employers, like BJC, also have an enormous stake in this. Even in a crippled economy marked by drastic staff reductions, large employers incur vast labor costs and have crucial labor needs. They pay staggering sums in health insurance for their employees. And above all, they rely every hour of every day on a healthy and motivated workforce to get the job done.
In an urban area like St. Louis, where percentages of African Americans are higher than they appear in the national average, race-based health disparities are of significant economic concern to large employers. Much of the local labor pool is African-American. Hiring a diverse workforce that employs large numbers of individuals from the black community is important for many reasons (that we often discuss in The St. Louis American).
BJC and other large employers simply can not afford for their black employees to be, on average, less healthy, more prone to health risks, subject to a shorter life span – and contending with this range of burdens within their immediate and extended families – than is the case with other employees.
Simply stated, reducing race-based health disparities – making more black people healthier – is good for business in St. Louis.