America Dissected

One of the most galling examples of inequity in America continues to be the stunningly high rate at which Black mothers die in pregnancy and childbirth and Black babies die before during their first year of life. Abdul reflects on how structural inequity continues to take mothers’ and babies’ lives. Then he talks to Rep. Lauren Underwood, Chair of the Black Maternal Health Caucus and sponsor of the “Momnibus” package to eliminate these disparities.Baby 2 Baby: https://baby2baby.org/Star Legacy Foundation: https://starlegacyfoundation.org/BabyQuest Foundation: https://babyquestfoundation.org/For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/americadissected.

Your right to swing your first ends where my face starts. That principle captures the limits of our freedoms in this country. And the Supreme Court has long held the precedent that people could be required to be vaccinated to protect the public from disease. But a recent ruling against workplace vaccine mandates may upend that. We speak with Prof. Melissa Murray, NYU Law professor and host of “Strict Scrutiny,” a podcast about the supreme court, about that, the retirement of Justice Breyer, and more.For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/americadissected.

President Biden ran on the idea of offering Americans a “public option” for health insurance — a government managed healthcare plan that would operate in parallel to private insurance. But what if we extended “public options” beyond health insurance to, say, pharmaceuticals or increased public investment in clinics and hospitals? Dana Brown is the Director of Health and Economy at the Democracy Collaborative and has been writing about just that. She joins Abdul to talk about it.For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/americadissected.

The CDC is the nation–perhaps the world’s–most preeminent public health agency. But it’s taken quite the beating throughout this pandemic. From flawed tests to unclear guidance to political tampering, the agency’s mistakes continue to mount. How did this happen, and how do we make sure it doesn’t happen again? Abdul talks about how public health mistakes happen and speaks with Dr. Tom Frieden, former CDC Director under President Obama about the past, present, and future of the once-storied agency. For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/americadissected.

Marginalized communities–including low-income and Black and brown folks, and women and LGBT people–are less likely to have reliable healthcare access in America. But it’s not just that, they’re less likely to have treatments tailored to the health challenges they’re more likely to face. That innovation gap, that’s a function of the way we fund research and the process by which innovations go to market, namely patents. Abdul reflects on the innovation gap and speaks w/ Professor Shobita Parthasarathy, an expert on science and technology policy about how to solve it.For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/americadissected.

Abdul and Guest Host Tre’vell Anderson answer everything you wanted to know (and maybe didn’t know you wanted to know) about public health, COVID-19, and the year ahead.For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/americadissected.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has promised action on President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, a sweeping package of legislation that would transform the American social experience. Along with critically important investments like universal childcare and paid family leave, the version that passed the House includes a slew of healthcare reforms. Abdul speaks to Jonathan Cohn, National Correspondent at HuffPost, and author of The Ten Year War, about the fight over protecting the Affordable Care Act, about the potential impact of the legislation.For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/americadissected.

Imagine someone could patent your arm, or your mouth. Well, for a long time, someone could patent a part of the human body, a DNA sequence. That all ended in 2013 with a landmark supreme court case. But it illustrates how science, business, and law intersect—in ways that shape our health today. Abdul speaks with Prof. Jose Contreras, Law Professor and Author of the new book, The Genome Defense.For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/americadissected.

Omicron has now made landfall in the US. We are learning more about the variant every day—good, bad, and ugly. We turn to Dr. Angie Rasmussen, America Dissected’s resident virologist to get into the nitty-gritty and help us understand what it means for us and the future of the pandemic.For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/americadissected.

Because of an accident of history, we think of our teeth as being wholly separate from the rest of our bodies. They even have different doctors. But teeth really are the entryway to the body, and the state of oral health in America says a lot about our inequities in general. Abdul talks to Mary Otto, journalist and author of Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America. Abdul also offers his perspective on the current COVID-19 surge and the new Omicron variant.For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/americadissected.