Photo by: Jeff Woods

Phil Christian’81 meets with faculty, staff, and students before delivering the keynote address at Beloit’s Martin Luther King Day convocation.

Quality health care for all Americans is one of the major challenges facing our society, and it will undoubtedly be among the pervasive issues in the national dialogue leading up to the 2008 elections.

But health care was long ago a key element of Martin Luther King’s civil rights agenda in the 1960s. In fact, it was the issue he singled out when he noted that “of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.”

Health care as a civil right was the topic of this year’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day convocation at Beloit College. The speaker was Dr. Phil Christian’81, an authority on the disparity between white and minority care.

Christian’s medical work has taken him from Seminole Indian reservations in Florida and war-torn Haiti, to 9/11 medical units in lower Manhattan, to elder care facilities in Baltimore, and to HIV/AIDS programs in Chicago and Detroit.

“Inadequate and inferior health care for minorities is one of those issues that bridges the gap between King’s active ministry and contemporary forms of discrimination,” Christian says. “Correcting the injustices in society cannot be accomplished in a vacuum, and adequate health care was certainly an important part of Dr. King’s concept of justice.”

Christian notes that at the time King identified health care as a civil rights issue in the mid-1960s, the list of major killers in the United States included diabetes, heart disease, cancer, stroke, and respiratory failure. Forty years later, they have hardly changed. A current Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report reveals that the major causes of death continue to be diabetes, heart disease, cancer, stroke, and respiratory failure. In the case of minorities, the report added premature death by violence and HIV/AIDS.

“The vocation I have chosen has me fighting to tear down remnants of injustice in health care every day,” Christian says. “There are many great things that I want to say about this country, but the disparity in health care represents the worst this country has to offer. It is shocking to see the difference in health care offered to the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots.’”

Christian’s work supports research findings that indicate the disparity is not only geographical. “I work a great deal in Baltimore, where Johns Hopkins is consistently ranked as the number-one hospital in the nation,” he says. “The CDC lists the black community that lives less than a mile from that hospital as having the worst health status of any community in the country.”

Christian has spent his career designing and providing health care systems to serve lower-income and underrepresented populations. He is currently dividing his time between developing access and policy guidelines at Johns Hopkins University Medical School and a challenging new effort to build a culturally competent health care delivery system for the Seminole Indians of south Florida.

“Gaining the trust of the Seminoles is my major work right now, and I spend three days a week in Florida doing just that,” he told a luncheon meeting of doctors, educators, and community leaders while visiting Beloit.

Christian explains that the Seminoles were coming close to extinction a few years ago, when Indian casino gambling opportunities suddenly caused the value of their sovereign reservations to soar. “Today, the record-breaking gaming income the tribe receives may actually serve as a disincentive for tribal members to take greater responsibility for improving their health status,” he says. “It may be a psychological catalyst underlying the disproportionately high rates of obesity, diabetes, renal disease, substance abuse, and lifestyle dysfunctions which exist in near-epidemic proportions in Native American communities.”

The Seminoles of south Florida represent only the latest chapter in the work of Christian, who was honored by the Beloit College Alumni Association last fall with the Distinguished Service Citation.

A biology major at Beloit, he went on to Northwestern University to do work in molecular biology. His medical education was at Rush University in Chicago and Eugenio de Hostos Medical College in the Dominican Republic, with a residency in emergency medicine through The Five Hospital Primary Care Program in Chicago.

His work in the early 1990s drew him to scrutinize federal programs dealing with HIV/AIDS treatment, Medicare and managed care, and special needs populations. One of those early opportunities provided a direct connection with Martin Luther King’s spirit and helped Christian set his course for the future.

In the mid-1990s, he served as health policy advisor to the Rev. Jesse Jackson at Operation PUSH & Black Expo in Chicago. His first day on the job, he was introduced to colleagues in a staff meeting, and as the meeting ended, Jackson turned to Christian and said, “When Dr. King came here to give us the guidance prayer to launch these efforts, he sat in the seat you are sitting in right now.”

Christian felt that incident helped set the tone for the rest of his career. “It told me that I had to do something special in my life that was powerful … something that provided me with a purpose.”

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