About Health Equity Policy
“We will have achieved the goal of health equity once we are unable to predict a person’s health or life expectancy based on their demographic characteristics or place of residence.”
– David K. Jones, PhD (2024)
Ripples of Hope in the Mississippi Delta: Charting the Health Equity Policy Agenda, Pg. 4 Prologue.
Equality, Equity, and Justice
The equality, equity, and justice images illustrate the concepts of social determinants of health, social justice, and structural drivers of health. The amount of fruit the people are able to reach or not reach illustrates how the politics of health affect health by either providing equitable or inequitable access to opportunities for having good health.
Equality Image – Each of the people in this image are all the same height and have the same number of boxes that are all the same shape and size. They are all in the vicinity of the tree. But, the ground underneath the people is structurally different. The ground under the person with the lightest color is higher than the ground under the person with the darkest color. This means that people standing on the highest ground are able to reach more fruit than people standing on the lowest ground. The difference in how much fruit they can reach is not because of anything intrinsic to them as individuals.
Equity Image – Equity is how we ensure everyone gets the resources they need to reach the fruit. Giving the person with the darkest color two more boxes doesn’t mean this person gets more fruit. It means that they are able to reach the fruit that the lightest skinned person was already able to reach.
Justice Image – In order to ensure social justice for everyone the structures that prevent equity need to be removed. Removing structural barriers is illustrated in this image by having the ground filled in so that no one needs to stand on boxes in order to have access to the fruit.
Author of “Ripples of Hope in the Mississippi Delta: Charting the Health Equity Policy Agenda”
David K. Jones, PhD
David K. Jones (1981-2021) was an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Law, Policy and Management at Boston University’s School of Public Health.
Co-Editors
Debra Bingham, DrPH, RN, FAAN
Founder and CEO, Institute for Perinatal Quality Improvement (www.perinatalQI.org); Retired Associate Professor, University of Maryland School of Nursing; David’s mother.
Email: info@perinatalQI.org
@Debra_Bingham or @DebraBinghamPQI
Debra Bingham, DrPH, RN, FAAN, Founder and CEO of the Institute for Perinatal Quality Improvement (PQI; www.perinatalQI.org) is working to eliminate preventable perinatal morbidity and mortality and end perinatal racial and ethnic disparities. She has over 30 years of clinical experience and has developed and led national, state, and hospital-based quality improvement initiatives. She has been quoted in the New York Times and USA Today, interviewed on NPR by Renee Montagne, on Studio 1A, and on Katie Couric’s podcast Next Question. She is a retired Associate Professor of Healthcare Quality and Safety at the University of Maryland School of Nursing.
Nicole Huberfeld, JD
Edward R. Utley Professor of Health Law & Professor of Law;
Boston University School of Public Health and School of Law;
@nhuberfeld1
Edward R. Utley Professor of Health Law, BU School of Public Health, and Professor of Law, BU School of Law. She studies the intersection of health law and constitutional law, often focusing on federalism while studying the needs of vulnerable populations in health reform, Medicaid, and reproductive care. She is co-author of two leading health law casebooks and national and international book chapters, law journal articles, peer-reviewed articles, and commentaries. Her work has been cited in judicial opinions by the U.S. Supreme Court and other courts and by federal agencies.
Previous books:
The Law of American Health Care (Aspen 2016) (with Outterson & Weeks)
2d Edition (2018) (with Outterson & Weeks)
3d Edition (2023) (with Weeks, Outterson & Lawrence)
Public Health Law, 3d ed. (Carolina Academic Press 2019) (with Mariner, Annas & Ulrich) (4th ed. forthcoming, anticipated late 2024)
Sarah Gordon, PhD, MS
Assistant Professor Department of Health Law, Policy, and Management;
Boston University School of Public Health
Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Law, Policy, and Management at the Boston University School of Public Health where she co-directs the BU Medicaid Policy Lab. She is a health services researcher with expertise in health insurance, access to care, and Medicaid policy. She applies econometric and causal inference-based methods to assess the impacts of state-level health care policies on low-income populations. Her recent work has focused on the intersections of Medicaid policy and maternal health. She served as a senior advisor on health policy in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in the Biden Administration from 2021-2024. She received her doctorate in Health Services Research from the Brown University School of Public Health and an MS in Social and Behavioral Sciences from the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.