Ansell does a magnificent job of uncovering the myriad ways in which structural racism in housing, employment, education, and health care, for a start creates unacceptable death gaps or disparities in life expectancy that are preventable and therefore morally unacceptable. This moving study delivers the harsh truth about the ways that racism infects our nation s health care system, and it does so with passion and eloquence. One comes away from
Death Gap feeling inspired to act, and that s a rare and wonderful accomplishment. --Beryl Satter, author of Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America"
The Death Gap describes critical health inequalities in the United States, which are drawn from Ansell s gripping first-person experiences as a leading practitioner operating in Chicago s medical safety net. He reveals the profound inequalities, particularly racial inequalities, that generate tremendous differences in lifespan and well-being across neighborhoods, and he provides powerful patient anecdotes that provide a human face to otherwise abstract challenges.
--Harold Pollack, University of Chicago"
"Ansell does a magnificent job of uncovering the myriad ways in which structural racism -- in housing, employment, education, and health care, for a start -- creates unacceptable 'death gaps' or disparities in life expectancy that are preventable and therefore morally unacceptable. This moving study delivers the harsh truth about the ways that racism infects our nation's health care system, and it does so with passion and eloquence. One comes away from
Death Gap feeling inspired to act, and that's a rare and wonderful accomplishment."--Beryl Satter, author of Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America
"
The Death Gap describes critical health inequalities in the United States, which are drawn from Ansell's gripping first-person experiences as a leading practitioner operating in Chicago's medical safety net. He reveals the profound inequalities, particularly racial inequalities, that generate tremendous differences in lifespan and well-being across neighborhoods, and he provides powerful patient anecdotes that provide a human face to otherwise abstract challenges."
--Harold Pollack, University of Chicago
"This passionate polemic uses powerful patient stories to highlight the importance of neighbourhood conditions, healthcare inequalities and poverty in explaining the health gap between black and white Americans. Drawing on detailed case studies of racial inequalities in breast cancer mortality, the health consequences of mass imprisonment, immigration status and access to healthcare, the Chicago heatwave and Hurricane Katrina, Ansell vividly unpicks a spider's web of causality. . . . This is a wide-ranging and very important book. Easy to read and engaging, it makes the social determinants come alive."--Clare Bambra "Times Higher Education "
David A. Ansell, MD, is the senior vice president and associate provost for community health , as well as the Michael E. Kelly Professor of Medicine, at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. He is the author of County: Life, Death, and Politics at Chicago's Public Hospital.