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Upstate alum explains how equity plays out in health care

David Ansell, MD

David Ansell, MD

Health equity is the concept of making sure those who need more get more. It's different from the idea of health equality, explains David Ansell, MD, a 1978 graduate of Upstate Medical University who is senior vice president for Community Health Equity at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. He talks about how caregivers at his institution screen patients about their housing, food and utilities as part of their health care. When he was a medical student in Syracuse, he says of himself and his fellow students, "all of us decided that health care was a human right." Ansell has gone on to become a health activist and wrote a book called "The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills."

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