
In their new book, “The Safety-Net Health Care System: Health Care at the Margins” WCPC Affiliates Gunnar Almgren and Taryn Lindhorst note that for uninsured, underinsured, and Medicaid-insured individuals, health care access is often limited to public, community, religious, and teaching hospitals and clinics. Safety-net teaching hospitals and clinics are also responsible for training the majority of the nation’s health care labor force and are where the nation’s future health care providers often have their first professional encounters with the poor. Almgren and Lindhorst argue that this early career intensive exposure to high poverty communities in the absence of an informed understanding of the causes and consequences of poverty contributes to the generation and maintenance of health care disparities.
Read more here.