Unhealthy Cities: Corporate Medicine, Community Economic Underdevelopment, and Public Health

Abstract

The growing corporate dominance in U.S. medical care has been a major factor in the increasingly inequitable distribution of health care resources and the declining public health conditions in poor and minority urban communities. Alongside this trend has been a parallel phenomenon of economic disinvestment and political neglect in these same at-risk neighborhoods. This article analyzes these trends as related components of austerity, retrenchment, and capital consolidation policies that have characterized the U.S. political economy for several decades. Emphasized are the relationships among corporatization, capital consolidation, deindustrialization of the workforce, and medical indigence; the resulting economic stress placed upon community hospitals and other caregivers in poor and minority communities; and the marked discrepancy between conditions of development and underdevelopment in American cities. It is argued that the effects of these policies are pathogenic in nature: they place populations at risk for disease and social dysfunction, they reduce access to necessary preventive and curative services, and they weaken coping mechanisms. Community economic development, empowerment, and a direct challenge to the growing concentration of wealth and power in the corporate class are proposed as essential elements of public health policy.

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