We start off the wrong premise when the desired goal for African Americans is to achieve equality of health as Caucasian Americans. If we were to take a global perspective, we would realize quickly the United States as whole is suffering from bad health and a broken system.

Just look at amount spent on health care (GDP) and look at the return on investmen (ROI). If a Wall Street analyst viewed this imbalance, for a business standpoint having unhealthy Americans and not getting the bank for your buck makes a unhealthy economy and people. We need to achieve higher and go further beyond the borders of the U.S. when we aspire for better in America.

Because frankly we are all sick and as long as we keeping comparing one group of severely unhealthy people against a not so unhealthy people we will remain unhealthy as a whole. Let's remember Albert Einstein's quote on insanity - doing the same thing and getting the same results. Let's stop the insanity before we are all in straight jackets. ;-)

Things to Do:

1. Start thinking global.
2. Act local.
3. Critically think and answer the context why we still have these issues.
4. Read books on the subject: American Health Dilemma, Dying While Black, etc.
5. Research the issue and go beyond the news headline.
6. Analyze the messenger and any conflict of interest.
7. Form a health consumer advocacy group to address the collective issue of social/economic/health disparities.
8. Think like a social entrepreneur.
9. Have a film discussion on the documentary " Unnatural Causes" on PBS or buy the DVD. www.unnaturalcauses.org

I am Lou Grubb, we are forming a new NAACP chapter in southwest Virginia. I appreciate Mr. Adam Whittenberg's article on health inequality of health. African Americans do not have the same health equality. The answer is prejudice, blacks do not have the same employment opportunities etc. or health care. I also know the federal EEOC offices are overworked and release all legitimate employment discrimination cases, without proper investigation. I feel the federal Govt holds allot of the responsibility. The NAACP should put more pressure on the federal system.

When i was hurt at work the doctor told me he didn't know if he can help me ,but he can get me a oscar for acting.i now have deformity in my spinal cord

This is an example of what Johan Galtung, Paul Farmer and others have termed "structural violence." In Farmer's definition, structural violence constitutes, "offenses against human dignity" such as "extreme and relative povery, social inequalities ranging from racism to gender inequality, and the more spectactular forms of violence that are uncontestedly human rights abuses, some of them punishment for efforts to escapse structural violence."

African American men in Harlem, as Farmer and others also note, have a lower life expectancy than do Bangladeshi men, although the US is one of the richest countries in the world and Bangladesh is one of the poorest.

It is shameful what we have so much and yet so few of us benefit, and when we do its distribution varies widely along the lines of class, so-called "race", gender, age, physiological capability and sexual identity.

If it is not the responsibility of the government of a people to ensure their basic survival, what, then, is the use of it?