Neoliberalization In Health Care

Neoliberalization’s propagation of health inequity in urban rebuilding processes and social movements against them: Baltimore’s story

This essay will discuss how neoliberal processes during redevelopment sustain and increase health inequities. It will highlight key neoliberal processes in urban redevelopment and examples of their impact on economic, political, and institutional social capital and subsequent public health effects. Examples of social movements challenging several neoliberal processes will be provided as one path toward changing the roots of health inequities. Introduction Too often neighborhoods which have been historically disinvested and demonized become prime real estate targets for development with the expectation

2009; Brenner, Peck and Theodore 2010) and health inequity mediated via diminished institutional, social, political, and economic capital of marginalized communities (Coburn 2000; Muntaner and Lynch 1999; Gomez and Muntaner 2005) (figure 1, figure 2). Using their conceptual framework for analysis (Peck, Theodore and Brenner 2009) examples of these three general strategies of neoliberalization in urban planning and rebuilding are adapted and organized to fit into neoliberalization’s creative destruction process, (Peck et al. 2009) (table 1). This process of destroying and creating occurs as “moments” and is contextually “embedded” and “path-dependent”: ”we emphasize the contextual embeddedness of neoliberal restructuring projects insofar as they have been produced within national, regional, and local contexts defined by the legacies of inherited institutional frameworks, policy regimes, regulatory practices, and political struggles. An understanding of actually existing neoliberalism must therefore explore the path-dependent, contextually specific interactions between inherited regulatory landscapes and emergent neoliberal, market-oriented restructuring projects at a broad range of geographical scales. These

Situated in historically marginalized racial minority and urban communities it results in the impoverished community being ill-prepared to compete in neoliberalism’s rules of engagement because such communities have little economic, social or political power. The remainder of this essay will address current rebuilding strategies in Baltimore within the framework of the three strategies of urban neliberalization described above (see table 1 for outline). Before doing so it is important to provide context from the past ways racialized neoliberalization community building existed pre-late1900’s. While the label “neoliberalization” became synonymous with the evolving US political economy during the Reagan administration, many of its strategies have been in practice for decades previous, perhaps with greater government oversight, more social welfare, and not as much private ownership of public goods -as a white supremacist liberal political economic system (Kendall 2003). The right of the white individual to secure outcomes in their best interest through a free market system permeates the past liberal and current neoliberal political economies of the US. In the current era of globalization and commodities speculation a broader range and diversity of participants from across the world and larger