Baltimore Confronts Enduring Racial Health Disparities (Nonprofit Quarterly)
Life expectancy in 14 of Baltimore’s predominantly Black neighborhoods is now lower than North Korea’s, notes Jim Grossfeld in the American Prospect. This is true even though, as Grossfeld points out, Baltimore is home to Johns Hopkins, which, Grossfeld observes, “Together with the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic…is part of the trinity of top-ranked US hospitals—a latter-day Lourdes to which sick people from around the world beat a path, hoping to find cures they’ll find nowhere else.”
The Baltimore City Health Department, in its “Healthy Baltimore 2020: A Blueprint for Health” report, points out that “although 97 percent of health-care dollars are spent on the health-care system, only 10 percent of what determines life expectancy actually happens ‘within the four walls of a clinic.’ The other 90 percent is decided upstream, where people live, work, go to school, and spend their free time.”