CBC Hour: Eliminating Health Disparities

Floor Speech

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Mr. DANNY K. DAVIS of Illinois. Mr. Speaker, I want to first of all commend our colleagues for coming here every week raising issues and promoting awareness. Tonight it is health care, health care disparities.

I believe that the big problem with the eradication of the disparities is the fact that we, as a nation, have not committed ourselves to the concept that health care ought to be a right and not a privilege. As the most technologically proficient nation on the face of the Earth, as the wealthiest nation with a quality of life for large numbers of people--that is commendable--we still have not reached the point where we take the position that every person, no matter what their status or circumstance, deserves the highest quality of health care that our Nation can afford for them.

So until we reach that point, we will continue to have studies and reports and we will continue to look at disparities, and we'll keep doing it and doing it and doing it and doing it again.

We will have legislation like the Affordable Care Act that is designed to close some of the gaps. And it does, in fact, close some of the gaps, and it's commendable that we have done that.

But I maintain that we have a health care system that really is a sickness care system. We do a good job of treating illnesses and sickness when people can get to the places where they get the treatment.

I had a call yesterday from a person who suggested that they had gone to the emergency room at the hospital and were given two Tylenol and sat in a room for a good period of time. When they inquired of the hospital why they had done that, they told them, Well, it's because of the ObamaCare; that ObamaCare is causing this to happen to you.

Now, the person actually has been on Social Security disability for a long time, before there was any ObamaCare and there was a way to pay for their health care, and somebody took the opportunity to misrepresent ObamaCare. I would hope that people would not, especially people in the industry, people in the business, would not do that.

But I also urge individual citizens to take more responsibility for our health. You know, there's still disparities in smoking, still disparities in drinking too much alcohol, still disparities in not having the appropriate diet or the exercise that is needed. So we've got to tack on several fronts. We've never put enough resources into the systems to make sure that they work properly and appropriately. We need to put more money into health education, health promotion, health awareness, so that individual citizens have a greater understanding of what it is that they individually can do.

Of course, people who know me know that I promote community health centers as the best way of providing ambulatory health care to large numbers of low-income people more effectively than anything else we've come up with, with the exception of Medicare and Medicaid, in a long time. I still promote these institutions as being one of the best ways in local communities of having health care delivery where people themselves are involved. These centers provide jobs and work opportunities and help keep the money in the neighborhood so that the impact of poverty is not as great as it would be.

So, Mr. Horsford, again, I want to thank you; I want to thank Mr. Jeffries; and I want to commend the caucus for raising the issues, promoting awareness, and helping, hopefully, to develop a different level of understanding. Health care ought to be a right and not a privilege.

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