Overview
The Public Health Law Center is committed to co-creating healthier, more equitable communities with our partners and allies. The roots of racism and other forms of systemic bias and oppression are deep. Laws and policies have contributed to significant disparities by failing to protect, and often actively harming, groups who are socially and economically marginalized. As professionals working with law and policy, we strive to center equity across our work in support of policy change that leads towards a more just and equitable world.
(Developed by the Mitchell Hamline School of Law’s Native American Law and Sovereignty Institute
and used on our website with permission)
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HEALTH EQUITY AND POLICY
Below are just a few of our resources that center equity in policy. Visit the Health Equity at the Public Health Law Center webpage to learn more.
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New CARE resource: Racial Equity Impact Assessment Laws
Racial Equity Impact Assessments (REIAs) can help predict how proposed policies may impact communities based on race or ethnicity. Through the Collaborative for Anti-Racism and Equity (CARE), the Public Health Law Center partnered with the Network for Public Health Law to create a summary of proposed or enacted legislation requiring REIAs in state-level legislative processes nationwide to support informed, just, and equitable.
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Expanding Health Care Access to All
More and more states are finding ways to use the power of state law and policy to expand and fund access to comprehensive health care for all, regardless of immigrations status. This policy brief describes the racist and xenophobic roots of current policies that exclude undocumented immigrants from access to health care insurance and delves how states are addressing these gaps to make it possible for all of us to live in communities where everyone has access to the health care services and supports we all need to live healthy lives.
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Executive Summary: Expanding Health Care Access to All Through State Law
This resource provides a high level summary of the longer policy brief called Expanding Health Care Access to All through State Law.
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Expanding Health Care Access to All Through State Law: Table of State Laws
This table summarizes laws extending access to health care insurance to undocumented immigrants in some or all age groups, based on income guidelines, enacted in 14 states and the District of Columbia.
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Expanding Health Care Access to All: State Case Studies
Expanding access to health care for all, regardless of immigration status, is a racial and health equity priority. This set of resources provides deeper insights into state policy levers to expand access to full health care for all.
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Pride and Prejudice: The Tobacco Industry’s Co-opting of the LGBTQ+ Community
Pride and Prejudice exposes the commercial tobacco industry's targeting of the LGBTQ+ community using historical documents, advertisements and marketing campaigns.
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The Tobacco Industry & the Black Community: The Targeting of African Americans
Factsheet describing the tobacco industry’s manipulation and abuse of targeted, at-risk populations and its use of front groups, distortion, and corporate giving to mask disreputable corporate conduct.
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Equity and Inclusion in Public Health Laws
Law impacts our health and our opportunities to lead healthy lives in multi-layered ways. This resource offers guidance on how to use the Five Essential Public Health Law Services Framework and other resources to address racism and other social determinants of health in the public health sector.
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Healthy Food Policy Project: Towards Equitable and Just Food Systems
This resource explores the evolving language of food systems and policy work centered on addressing structural racism and inequity. It describes equity-focused terms and frameworks related to the food system, outlines how these terms and frameworks are used in food policy, and provides examples of what they mean in practice.
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Does a human rights-based approach to harm reduction support commercialized harm reduction?
This article, written by staff attorney Neil Sircar and research assistant Mary Fleming, reviews industry materials from 2017 to 2022 to identify themes in the harm reduction narrative of the tobacco industry and analyse those themes using an HRBA to the tobacco harm reduction framework.
Does a human rights-based approach to harm reduction support commercialized harm reduction? -
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Centering Equity in the Tobacco Control Act's Public Health Standard
Overview of the legal standard by which FDA makes some of its most important tobacco control regulatory decisions and explanation of why health equity should guide its decision making in setting product standards and reviewing new products.
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Pride in Policy: Advancing the Health of the LGBTQ+ Community
This presentation describes the history of tobacco marketing to LGBTQ+ communities by highlighting industry documents, print advertisements, and social media. Presenters will also cover policy strategies to help lessen the burden of tobacco in LGBTQ+ communities, such as smoke free and commercial tobacco free policies at Pride festivals and menthol and other flavor bans.
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Changing Hearts, Minds, and Structures
This article describes policy and programmatic approaches in four states, with a focus on a landmark equity policy adopted by the Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS).
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Equity in Action: Operationalizing Processes in State Governance
This article showcases efforts in California, Colorado, and Minnesota to embed an equity lens into the formulation and implementation of legislated and non-legislated policies and practices.
Equity in Action: Operationalizing Processes in State Governance
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