By Laurie Ignacio
Health Fellow, The Greenlining Institute
As residents of California we should demand that state resources be used towards the public good. In California, the public is comprised of 51%, people of color, meaning that minorities are now the state’s new majority. Therefore, the issues people of color face are the issues that California faces as a whole. This is particularly the case for rural California, where communities of color often exist under extremely difficult living and labor conditions in the state. Yet, the State of California continues to drain resources away from two essential necessities for low-income rural communities of color: Health and Education. In fact, it has become largely acceptable for more resources to be allocated towards the state’s prison system than for health and education.
I recently heard a presentation from a representative from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). She discussed plans to build a cutting edge medical facility in Stockton, California. At over a million square feet, it will be the largest hospital in the United States. However, this enormous hospital was not going to be built for the health needs of the 4 million people in the San Joaquin Valley. Rather, it was going to be built to provide health services for incarcerated persons, and though people of color disproportionately represent the prison population relative to general population figures, the priorities seemed misaligned with realities. Her presentation begged the question (though for less than altruistic reasons): How can the state of California invest so much in the prison system but not in the educational system that trains rural and public healthcare providers?
After doing some research I found a few startling statistics: Over the last twenty-five years, California has built twenty-one new prisons and just one new University of California campus. The majority of those new prisons were built in the San Joaquin Valley, yet UC Merced is the only new educational institution serving the Valley. The prison budget is more than two and a half times greater than the entire budget for the entire University of California system ($10.1 billion versus $3.7 for the University system).
Furthermore, 38% of the California prison population is Latino but Latinos only make up 37% of the state population as a whole. This statistic is even more severe for the African American community who comprise only 6% of California’s population but a whopping 29% of the prison population. The state finances the incarceration of minorities at higher rates than it finances their education. We see an even stronger contrast in minorities in health education. Latinos account for 37% of the state population, yet only 5% of its physician pool. African Americans account for 6% of the population and only 3% of California physicians.
How does this discrepancy manifest itself in the health outcomes for people of color? Due to a lack of access to quality healthcare, minorities are disproportionately affected by poor health. Federally-designated Health Professional Shortage Areas (HPSA) are predominantly found in rural and inner-city areas of concentrated poverty, particularly African American and Latino impoverished neighborhoods.
Earlier this year, the Greenlining Institute published a report entitled Representing the New Majority: A Status Report on the University of California Medical Student Body. The purpose of this study was to understand how the UC system was performing in producing doctors from underrepresented minority communities. While the UC medical school system has seen improvement in diversity as a whole, it is still far away from mirroring California’s population. Currently, UC Merced is in the planning process of opening a medical school that would serve the San Joaquin Valley. Hopefully it can work with community leaders and members to rectify health disparities in rural California and increase culturally and linguistically competent health care that it the state so desperately needs.
**Statistics from Representing the New Majority and Open Letter to Governor Schwarzenegger from the Greenlining Institute. 9/16/2008
**To read Representing the New Majority or for more information please visit: www.greenlining.org
Laurie Ignacio can be reached at lauriei@greenlining.org
Article posted on 10/22/08 |
