In the 12 months following the 2003 legalization of same sex marriage in Massachusetts, gay and bisexual men had a significant decrease in medical care visits, mental health care visits, and mental health care costs, compared with the 12 months before the law change. This amounted to a 13 percent reduction in health care visits and a 14 percent reduction in health care costs.
14% cost reduction- DAYUM! These results hold true even for men who had no plans to marry.
Color me shocked, SHOCKED, that removing (one, major) form of institutional oppression results in improved health for oppressed people. Shocked! (Of course by shocked I mean not surprised at fucking all.)
Now lemme extrapolate a little. Women experience depression at twice the frequency of men. Twice. Double. I can’t imagine why living in a world full of fucking gender based violence and oppression might cause women to be more at risk of depression as men are, can you? Nope, must be that us ladies are weak or hysterical or something. I don’t know. I have a lady brain and have to pause while I cry over a video of baby kittens.
Lemme extrapolate again. 41% Blacks suffer hypertension, while only 27% of Whites do. And when Black people are more likely to have hypertension at a younger age and with more severe effects than whites. Hypertension is known to be caused by stress. You don’t think it might be the fucking stress of racism? Nooooooooooooooo that would be silly. It must be because Black folks don’t know how to eat healthy and exercise like good white folks do.
Oppression is hard on the body and hard on the brain. And it turns out that even people who benefit from oppression in highly stratified societies have poorer health than those in less oppressed societies, i/e the rich in the U.S. aren’t as well off health-wise as the rich in somewhere like Finland.
So the next time some douchecanoe wants to whinge on about poor people on medicaid using up all the resources, smack that person in the head and tell (most likely) him to shut his pie hole. If he wants oppressed people to be more healthy he can stop fucking benefiting from undeserved privilege.