Perspectives

Healthcare in rural Missouri faces an uncertain future, but Medicaid expansion offers us an opportunity to keep hospitals afloat, improve rural health, and bring tax dollars back to our state. Our neighboring states are seeing the benefits of Medicaid expansion, and August 4th is Missouri’s chance to join them, write Adrienne Visani, Evaline Xie and Kristine Huang.

As a medical student, I will be at the polls advocating for the expansion of Medicaid, which will save the lives and livelihoods of my future patients. In reality, however, we all have a social responsibility to preserve the health of our communities—in this case it’s as easy as voting yes, writes Nikita Sood.

Adia Harvey Wingfield, of Arts & Sciences, has published an article in the Harvard Business Review explaining how the university has built “one of the more racially diverse departments in academia today,” the Department of Sociology in Arts & Sciences.

Not only is it the right thing to do for so many who lack access to health care, but I can’t think of anything that could more quickly transform the economic outlook of St. Louis, its surrounding counties and the state of Missouri, writes David Perlmutter.

Chancellor Andrew D. Martin and Saint Louis University President Fred Pestello co-author an op-ed in the St. Louis American about the importance of expanding Medicaid. The issue is before voters in the Aug. 4 election.

Voting yes on Amendment 2 brings federal dollars back to Missouri to serve the people who deserve them. That means 230,000 hard-working people – including 36,000 Black Missourians – will have access to health care they currently cannot afford. We owe it to them to bridge this unethical gap by making sure our voices are heard, writes Andrew Martin.

Cecelia L. Calhoun, MD, at the School of Medicine, co-writes an op-ed published in USA Today about how Black medical students and health-care workers can change the health-care system to end racial disparities in medicine.

Shaming and threatening students will only obstruct public-health efforts. If universities want to reopen and stay open, administrators need to adopt a compassionate and realistic approach that supports students in staying socially connected and mentally healthy—not just free of coronavirus infection, writes Jessica Gold.

Trump’s success rate at the Supreme Court is quite low: He has prevailed only 47 percent of the time, a worse record than that of his predecessors going back at least as far as Franklin D. Roosevelt, writes Lee Epstein.

Medical critical care director Patrick Aguilar, MD, at the School of Medicine, talks in this video about what the school and hospital system did to plan for the COVID-19 pandemic.