A Chicken in Every Pot — and an A/C in Every Window?

By Willy Blackmore | Word In Black

(WIB) – It’s called a heat dome because when such a warm-weather system clamps down over an area, high temperatures are trapped underneath. Until the high-pressure ridge that causes it moves along, there’s little relief for the people who are trapped underneath. 

Three years ago, a heat dome in the Pacific Northwest and Western Canada sent temperatures in the famously temperate region soaring: Portland’s temperature hit a record 109 degrees, and two different parts of Oregon reached 119 degrees, an all-time high. 

More than 100 people died that month. The state’s Climate and Health Report from the following year noted that “most who died were elderly, isolated and living with low incomes.” It’s safe to assume they were living without air conditioning, which is uncommon across much of Oregon. 

In many ways, the victims had a lot in common with a deadly heatwave in Chicago that killed 739 people — except, unlike Oregon, a disproportionate number of them were Black.

Oregon is now taking a new approach to helping protect the poor and often elderly residents who are not only at the risk of dying during a heatwave, but of suffering from heat-related illness. In 2021, 59% of hospital emergency-department visits due to heat in Oregon lived in ZIP codes with a median income of less than $50,000. 

State residents who are on Medicaid could soon get equipment like air conditioners, air purifiers, back-up power banks, and other electronics and small appliances that can be vital during the kinds of extreme weather events that are exacerbated by climate change. While some states use Medicaid funds to help with social services that fall outside of the traditional notion of what healthcare is, like getting unhoused people into housing, this is the first time that Medicaid has been used as a preemptive prescription against harm from climate change. 

It’s an idea that, if expanded, could provide significant benefits to Black communities, too. 

While Oregon in particular has a very small Black population, thanks to centuries of racist, exclusionary state laws, Black people in most parts of the country are disproportionately affected by extreme heat.

In nearly every urban community of color, for example, residents have greater exposure to extreme heat than in white communities, with the greatest heat-island exposures affecting Black and Latinx people, according to a 2021 study published in the journal Nature. 

A 2022 study on heat mortality found that in New York City, Black residents are twice as likely to die from heat stress as white residents. While Black neighborhoods are hotter as a result of redlining and disinvestment, whether or not you have a window unit within an apartment in a neighborhood with few trees, few greenspaces, and too much uninterrupted concrete is often a question of money. 

Like the Oregon residents who died in 2021, many of the Black Chicagoans who died in a 1994 heatwave were poor, too. 

Air conditioners provided through Medicaid could give targeted relief to the very vulnerable in poor Black communities. Nationally, around 40 percent of Black people under 65 were insured through Medicaid (or another public program) in 2022, while just over half received health insurance through an employer. 

Being able to adequately and correctly respond to heat-related illness is an important part of safely managing extreme temperatures. But that response, as the New York City report puts it, “must be coupled with equitable investments in structural interventions and heat mitigation measures, for example energy efficient home cooling that New Yorkers can afford to run and tree planting and greening, to protect residents throughout the increasingly hot warm season weather.” 

In other words, if homes are properly cooled, there are fewer heat-related illnesses to have to treat. But while an air conditioning unit in every window would go a long way toward making heatwaves less deadly for Black Americans, having a/c is just one part of the equation.

In Chicago in 1994, some people with window units died nonetheless because they didn’t turn them on; they were too worried about the electric bill. So if having an air conditioner is now arguably healthcare, being able to afford running it, particularly during periods of extreme heat, is healthcare too.