11.04.21 Hall Center Virtual Grand Rounds Fall Series with Professor Brietta R. Clark

In this presentation, Professor Brie Clark explores the role of trust in shaping health, and she invites us to think critically about how the existing trust deficit impacting certain groups is a product of existing health law and policy. This trust deficit has received heightened attention during the COVID-19 pandemic—most prominently raised in connection with government and health officials' early concerns about vaccine uptake by Black individuals, and most commonly characterized as the product of a history of medical experimentation and abuse against Black people. But this narrow focus and understanding of the trust deficit that shapes the Black community's experiences with the health system obscures the full scope and impact of the problem, which, in turn, risks enabling government responses that exacerbate, rather than reduce, health inequity. This presentation surveys pervasive and contemporary sources of mistrust that undermine individualized health care, broader health promotion efforts, and professed racial equity goals, to illustrate why the trust deficit deserves greater interrogation as a structural determinant of health in COVID-19 and beyond.  It also suggests that the concept of trust provides a valuable lens through which to evaluate the ongoing pandemic responses and other health law and policy reforms, in terms of how likely they are to advance or undermine emerging commitments to health equity. 

Brietta R. Clark, J.D., is a Professor of Law and J. Rex Dibble Fellow at Loyola Marymount University Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. She teaches in the areas of health care law, reproductive justice, bioethics, and torts. Clark's research focuses on health care access, specifically the structural and individual forces that shape health and create inequity in our health delivery and financing systems. She has written and provided commentary on issues such as health reform, Medicaid access, immigrant health, reproductive and sexual health barriers, prison health care, and health literacy. She is also a co-author of the Eighth Edition of the Furrow et al. Health Law casebook. Clark provides community education on health reform and remains active in the health professional and legal communities, including assisting organizations seeking to protect health care access and quality in the face of hospital mergers, insurance benefit design and provider network practices, and professional licensing regulation.