The role of American hospital expansions in health disparities and medical apartheid

Health Colonialism considers how U.S. urban development policies contribute to the uneven and unjust distribution of health care in this country. Here, Shiloh Krupar investigates the racially inequitable effects of elite U.S. hospitals on their surrounding neighborhoods and their role in consolidating frontiers of land primed for redevelopment.

Naming this frontier “medical brownfields,” Krupar shows how hospitals leverage their domestic real estate empires to underwrite international prospecting for patients and overseas services and specialty clinics. Her pointed analysis reveals that decolonizing health care efforts must scrutinize the land practices of nonprofit medical institutions and the liberal foundations of medical apartheid perpetuated by globalizing American health care.

Shiloh Krupar is a geographer and Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor in the Culture and Politics Program at Georgetown University. She is author of Hot Spotter’s Report: Military Fables of Toxic Waste and coauthor of Deadly Biocultures: The Ethics of Life-Making (both from Minnesota). Krupar coedited A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado and codirected the National Toxic Land/Labor Conservation Service.