Black Minnesotans rally for affordable, equitable health care

Black Minnesotans gathered Wednesday, two weeks before the midterm elections, to call for a stronger, more equitable health care system and urge elected officials to address barriers to affordable, quality care.

The rally, titled “Our Lives, Not Their Profits,” was organized by Faith in Minnesota and held Oct. 21 at Greater Friendship Missionary Baptist Church. The event brought together community members, advocates and elected officials to discuss the state of Minnesota’s health care system and hear directly from Black residents about the challenges they face in accessing affordable, quality care.

“We did some deep listening last year in Black churches and in the Black neighborhoods to build an agenda,” said JaNaé Bates Imari, a minister and co-executive director of Faith in Minnesota. “And that agenda was to find out what do Black Minnesotans really care about. Time and time again, people are in a health care crisis. As a matter of fact, it is getting even worse, because of the way in which health care corporations and even hospitals have been operating.”

Despite affordability challenges for many Minnesotans, the health care industry continues to generate substantial revenue. UnitedHealth Group, one of the nation’s largest health care companies, reported $447.6 billion in consolidated revenue for 2022, according to the company’s financial reports.

“This is a health care corporation that makes the fourth most profit in the whole world,” Imari said. “We crunched the numbers and if every single Minnesotan were to get affordable, quality health care, it would cost about five billion dollars a year.”

The rally also gave community members an opportunity to share their experiences through a survey administered by the Black Church Power Project. Organizers said the goal was to better understand which health care challenges are affecting Black Minnesotans most significantly.

Preliminary survey results presented Wednesday evening showed that 75% of participants believed profits too often come before patients, while 95% agreed that every Minnesotan should be guaranteed access to quality, affordable health care.

Alongside community advocates, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and state Rep. Cedrick Frazier, who was running for Hennepin County attorney at the time of the event, attended the rally to discuss their perspectives on improving access to health care.

Ellison criticized the role of pharmaceutical companies in determining the cost of medications, arguing that public investment often helps make medical research possible before private companies profit from the results.

“Your money goes into the research at the universities to figure out these complicated drugs; these universities carry the cost, the public carries the cost right up until it has a market value, then the companies buy it, then the companies own it, and they jack you up for it. It’s wrong, five times wrong,” Ellison said. “We pay more for health care in the United States than anybody in the world. And guess what, you would think it’d be the best health care, right? Wrong.”

Frazier reflected on his decision to run for office during the COVID-19 pandemic and the concerns he had about the virus’s potential impact on vulnerable communities, including his own family.

“I think about that because when I was running at that time, I was terrified and we were thinking about how COVID was going to impact the people because a lot of my family has pre-existing conditions,” Frazier said. “Diabetes, hypertension, all those ills. And if you’re Black, many of those things we have.”

Disparities in health outcomes and access to care between Black and white Americans have been documented for decades. Black women, in particular, face significant challenges in maternal health and the treatment of chronic conditions.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Minority Health, the maternal mortality rate for Black women in 2022 was more than twice the national rate. Research published in 2021 and available through the National Library of Medicine also documented racial disparities in conditions such as hypertension and obesity among women.

CeMarr Peterson, a Black woman living with a chronic illness, described experiencing discrimination within Minnesota’s health care system and said she believes Black women’s concerns are too often dismissed by medical professionals.

“We’re not trusted, we’re not respected, we’re not believed when we go into the hospital, into these spaces that are supposed to be there for us and care for us,” Peterson said. “Black women are at the bottom of the totem pole when it comes to not getting the health care that they deserve. That impacts everyone around us. It impacts our babies. It impacts our families; it impacts our neighbors and our friends around us.”

As the rally concluded, organizers encouraged attendees to vote, cast their ballots early when possible and help friends and family members make a plan to vote.

Imari argued that political divisions can distract from the economic and health care concerns affecting Minnesotans, including the rising costs of medical treatment and potential changes to public health insurance coverage.

“The reality is that what we are seeing right here in Minnesota is a group of people who want the closing argument of Minnesota to be about fraud. They would much prefer that Minnesotans are fighting it out and are divided and are fearful so that they could completely ignore the fact that there are things that are due to us, that they have not delivered on,” Imari said.

She also criticized the financial incentives within the health care industry, arguing that pharmaceutical companies and hospitals profit while patients struggle to afford treatment.

“Not only is this an industry that is literally making money on our backs, out of our suffering, there are prescription drug folks making money, hospitals making money, all at our expense and at our expense of our health,” Imari said.

Imari ended with a warning about the potential consequences of people losing access to Medicaid, the public health insurance program for eligible low-income individuals and families.

“People are literally dying. This cliff that we’re headed toward where literally hundreds of thousands of people are about to get kicked off of their Medicaid. That also equals death. And I’m not using hyperbole,” she said.

Izzy Canizares is a contributing writer for the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder. He welcomes reader responses at isabellacani0102@gmail.com.