Starr and Wailoo discuss U.S. health care

On Tuesday night, sociology professor Paul Starr and history professor Keith Wailoo gave an informal talk on the different perspectives of the current healthcare situation in America. Both professors presented introductions of their previous works on the topic and shared their insights on past, present and future issues involving American healthcare. Starr is the author of Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Social Transformation of American Medicine” and, more recently, “Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar American Struggle Over Healthcare Reform.” Wailoo is the author of “Dying in the City of Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health.”

“The U.S. stands out in healthcare not only because of how many people are uninsured but because we have fought about it for so long,” Starr said, noting that his fascination with healthcare began in the 1970s, during a time when many directions in health care were being explored. “Unfortunately, decade by decade, we came to the conclusion that we cannot solve this problem.”

In Wailoo’s initial discussion of his work on the correlations between cancer, race and gender, he focused on the history of cancer over the last 100 years. What began as a disease which largely plagued Caucasian women from higher socioeconomic means gradually began to cross the color line, he explained.

Wailoo said that in the early 20th century, cancer was easier to diagnose in women because the symptoms were more obvious than in men. “We live in an era where black women have lower breast cancer rates but greater chances of dying from the disease,” he said. “My book is a story of how perceptions change over the course of the 20th century.” After brief introductions of their works, the professors addressed audience questions. In response to a question about the way American citizens viewed the Medicare system, Starr said that there is a rising trend in which people who receive benefits from the system are not aware that those benefits are coming from the government.

He warned that this misunderstanding can lead to the mistake of wanting to keep government out of Medicare, an impossible request because it is a government program. Starr also said that, though Medicare has the lowest administrative costs to the government, it could still be a better program.

In response to a question about why people tend to use genetics to explain diseases, Wailoo said that, though genetics are an interesting way to explain disease, we should also look at them through the lens of different environments.

As an example, Wailoo cited the evolution of the breast self-examination since 1951. “Women who do breast self-examinations have had two and three generations of learning to care about their importance,” Wailoo said. He compared this scenario to an immigrant woman who does not know the importance of BSEs.

With the audience questions consistently shifting the topics of the discussion, Starr summarized the event by explaining, “We have a history of political compromise in U.S. healthcare. Healthcare didn’t have to be this complex; in fact, it isn’t this complex in other countries. It is the result of our politics.”

A professor of sociology and public affairs, Starr also co-founded and co-edits The American Prospect, a monthly magazine that covers politics, culture and policy from a liberal perspective.

The conversation, titled “Healthcare, Cancer and Race in America,” was held at Labyrinth Books Tuesday night in honor of Starr’s last release, “Remedy and Reaction.”