I watched my patients die of poverty for 40 years. It’s time for single-payer.

The Washington Post | David A. Ansell Sarai was 25 years old when she died of Wilson’s disease, an inherited disorder that causes liver failure. A liver transplant could have cured her, but she was uninsured and was denied an appointment at two prominent Chicago transplant hospitals, including my own. Sarai’s plight was brought to my attention when a local religious group held a hunger strike advocating transplant access for Sarai and other uninsured patients. When she died, her ...

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NBC Make It

Trump calls single-payer ‘a curse’—here’s what data from other countries actually show

CNBC | Ester Bloom | 10:34 AM ET Fri, 15 Sept 2017 A group of 17 Senators led by Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced a bill calling for "Medicare for All" this week, a position supported by over 50 percent of Americans, according to an Economist/YouGuv poll from this year. With the Trump Administration and the Republicans in Congress opposed, it's unlikely to advance, but top officials have nonetheless come out firmly against the idea. That's despite the fact that increased ...

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Author David Ansell Exposes Inequality’s Deadly Influence

Tuesday, August 22, 2017 |by Martha Jablow, special to AAMCNews Drawing on a four-decade career of practicing medicine in Chicago, David A. Ansell, MD, MPH, has written The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills, an indictment of economic inequality and its impact on health. The book was published in May by the University of Chicago Press. Ansell is professor of medicine at Rush Medical College, senior vice president for community health equity at Rush University Medical Center, and ...

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New book explores the deadliness of inequality

By David Ansell, M. D. Contributor Life expectancy in Oak Park and River Forest is 83 years. But cross Austin Boulevard into the Austin neighborhood of Chicago and life expectancy plummets to under 72. While headlines portray Austin as an epicenter for Chicago's violence epidemic, the life span gap between Austin and Oak Park result from excess cases of heart disease, diabetes and cancer. Read the full article >>

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Why The Haves Are Healthy And The Have-Nots Suffer

WBEZ Chicago We often hear about how the growing income inequality in America is preventing families from buying a home, or paying for college. But the sharp divide between the haves and the have-nots also has a serious impact on people’s health. There is a staggering 30-year gap in life expectancy between the rich and the poor in America, and this trend holds true in Chicago where a person’s lifespan is based on race, income, and neighborhood. Read & Listen >>

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Streetwise: The Death Gap

By: Suzanne Hanney June 15, 2017 When David A. Ansell, M.D. co-hosted a fundraiser for Barack Obama’s U.S. Senate campaign in 2003, he asked the future president about national health care reform. Obama gave Ansell the outline of the future Affordable Care Act (ACA). Obama favored a single-payer system, but said “it will never get passed in the United States.” Health insurance companies held so much political power – 250,000 employees across the U.S. and a huge lobbying apparatus ...

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Healthcare: ‘Not a matter of left or right; a matter of right and wrong’

KATHI VALEII | THURSDAY, JUNE 15, 2017 “Sober but optimistic” is how Dr. David A. Ansell describes the subject of his work on inequities in heath care. Dr. Ansell is the senior vice president of community health equity and associate provost for clinical affairs at the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, work he says he does as a physician under the umbrella of human rights activist. He's written two books that call attention to structural violence in healthcare. His latest, ...

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The World University Rankings: The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills, by David A. Ansell

Clare Bambra commends a polemic that shines a light on the fatal flaws in US healthcare policy In the US, the poor die earlier, black Americans die earlier and poor urban black Americans die earliest of all. In this thoughtful and compelling book, David Ansell draws on almost four decades as a hospital doctor in Chicago in addressing these striking inequalities in health and laying bare the underside of the American dream. The Death Gap shows the scale of the human cost of income ...

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NEJM Podcast 208: How inequality kills — David Ansell talks with us about his new book

https://podcasts.jwatch.org/index.php/podcast-208-how-inequality-kills-david-ansell-talks-with-us-about-his-new-book/2017/06/10/

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