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Takaro's Statement On Individual Responsibility

Decent Essays

The lives of each person brought up in episode 1 represent a different career, income bracket, district, and corresponding level of control. Just as wealth determines the amount of control and stressors each of these individuals faces, it predicts rates of disease per district. This differing prevalence of disease in each district can easily be explained by the individual-level differences of wealth and income and resources. That with each downward step in wealth individuals, in turn, begin to lack the control, resources, and environment to lead healthy lives. In response Dr. Adewale Troutman’s statement on individual responsibility in episode 1, individual Responsibility is important only within social context, without social determinants …show more content…

Tim Takaro’s statement in episode 5, capitalism and free-market forces are based on exploitation and profit yields, a system that privileges profits cannot, in turn, ensure values like health and often times exploit it. Healthy homes and neighborhoods for an affordable cost does not have the best profit margins and does not merit as much as a home apropos for one’s class that ignores health entirely. And many times, healthy housing initiatives, reinvention, and reinvestment are shady gentrification movements that hurt as many, if not more of, the impoverished that it says it will help. Like the gentrification movement of East Liberty in Pittsburgh that destroyed 22,000 affordable housing units and replaced only 7,000 in hopes of creating a “mixed income” neighborhood. Many black impoverished residents that once lived in East Liberty were pushed back to Northside and Homestead. The argument for the gentrification of East Liberty was pitched as a purely economic argument. However the policy to create new, healthy, affordable housing for the displaced tenants was there, it just wasn’t enforced. So beyond new policy, we need strong, uncompromising backers to create successful nonmarket solutions for these …show more content…

So while it’s possible to triumph over fate, it’s so difficult we shouldn’t even expect citizens to perpetuate this. However, ideally, individuals should be able to determine their own fate because then individuals can be judged by the integrity of their character and not the forces that shaped them. Because we see all American movements, constructions, and actions as inherently individualistic or stemming from the inhibited work of the “individual,” we treat corporations as individuals and give them rights as such and believe that government should not infringe on our, or our states’, autonomy in any way. Meaning both corporations and Americans receive aid and support on a case by case basis rather than in an equal fashion. Despite the inequality of aid and because we believe that America’s legal conception of freedom, liberty, and rugged individualism works in practice and in reality, we think that poor economic and health outcomes are a product of personal responsibility. Instead of evaluating social forces, we challenge and blame the individual, and thus America becomes one of the only developed countries to deny their citizens universal health care, comprehensive unemployment

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