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Empirical points

margauxf

“Under a 1986 federal law titled the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), hospitals are required to treat people who come to the ED presenting with an emergency medical condition, defined as a condition that, without treatment, will likely lead to serious impairment or death. … EMTALA is one of the largest federal mandates to provide services to have gone unfunded (Friedman 2011); costs instead fall on states and local health care systems.” 481

Quotes

margauxf

“In bringing ethnographic attention to hot spotting as a technique of governance, we find that it provides lifesaving humanitarian interventions while operating within the racialized structures of violence that produce continual life crises. The institutional rationality of hotspotting and the encounters of care that it produces illustrate the often-contradictory role of medicine in the lives of poor people: both caring and coercive, it intertwines care and violence.” 475; “we conclude by suggesting that economic investment and return are becoming a reigning logic in the governance of poverty, generating hot spots as sites of interest for both policing and health care and decentering normative assessments of deviance, illness, and social problems” 476; “Neoliberal social assistance, as it is practiced in the health care safety net, is conceptualized as an “investment “in the population, as a strategic and targeted deployment of basic resources, one that promises to generate a return on investment for the state or health system in the form of cost savings.“ 485

 

Summary

margauxf

 The authors examine the practice of “hot spotting,” a form of surveillance and intervention through which health care systems in the US intensively direct health and social services towards high-cost patients.  Health care hot spotting is seen as a way to improve population health while also reducing financial expenditures on healthcare for impoverished people. The authors argue that argue that ultimately hot spotting targets zones of racialized urban poverty—the same neighborhoods and individuals that have long been targeted by the police. These practices produce “a convergence of caring and punitive strategies of governance” (474). The boundaries between the spaces of healthcare and policing have shifted as a “financialized logic of governance has come to dominate both health and criminal justice” (474).

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Chris J Tang

"So far, however, the idea of setting up a trust fund to allow the Haitian government to eradicate cholera by providing clean water and sanitation has been a deal-killer among international donors."

"'If we do get a final order that the UN's immunity doesn't apply, we would expect the UN to put in clean water and sanitation and compensate the victims,' Concannon says [....] That's the optimistic view."

"That kind of political morass is one big reason - though by no means the only one - why the billions in relief and recovery aid haven't been enough to rescue Haiti from the disasters that fate kept flinging its way."

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maryclare.crochiere

""USAID has spent about $1.5 billion since the earthquake,' Johnston told Goats & Soda. 'Less than a penny of every dollar goes directly to a Haitian organization.'"

This quote shows the extreme difference in total money donated compared to the money that is being used to help Haiti directly. I was mentioned that their government is hard to trust, so outside companies tend to hold the money, but that means that they can decide how they want to spend it.

"The U.N. and its agents are "absolutely immune from suit in this Court," Oetken ruled."

This quote shows the irony of the situation, by using the word "immune" it brings light to the fact that the UN's actions had major impacts on Haiti, from with the people of Haiti are very much not "immune", as cholera affects so much of the population.

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maryclare.crochiere

There arent any references along with this document, but the author presumably researched where dontaions go, conducted interviews with the volunteers that travel to help out on the island, as well as investigating how the rebuild process is going in comparison to the state of the island before the disaster.

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maryclare.crochiere

The main point is the lack of justice for Haiti in this rebuild process. They got huge amounts of dontions from all over the world in hopes of rebuilding the country to be better than it was. Insead, the vast majority of the money is not being spent in the right ways, and much of the spending is not being done in the most economical ways. The ways that the companies are going about rebuilding is much more wasteful than it has to be, thus using more of the money and preventing it from going as far as it could.  Additionally, the UN has created a cholera epidemic in Haiti and is not being held accountable for cleaning it up.

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maryclare.crochiere

 Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti - Boston nonprofit - human rights

NPR - National Public Radio - news source

 President Michel Martelly - Haitian president

Nepalese soldiers - from the UN - brought Cholera

United Nations

Secretary­General Ban Ki­moon - UN

Haitian Ministries of Health and Environment

Center for Economic Policy and Research - Washington

U.S. District Court Judge J. Paul Oetken

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maryclare.crochiere

The article dicusses how the UN has caused major health issues but is not being held accountable by the court's decision, so that is a clear injustice for Haiti. Additionally, the only money that goes directly to Haitians to spend in the recovery has been spent on helping increase children's immunizations rates and increase HIV medical treatment, so they have shown some ability to help themselves when given the resources.