Like many Black women across the South, I come from a family of care workers. Nearly every woman on my mothers side of the family my mother, aunts, grandmother, and great grandmother cared for white families in the segregated Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Their stories are the story of the American economy: built on the backs of Black women who were undervalued, underprotected, and, for centuries, underpaid. For generations, the economy has left behind the care workforce and families who need care but can’t afford it. And children whose education depends on the zip code they were born in.
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Today the employer-based family-benefits platform Cleo announced a slew of new product features aimed at helping working Black and BIPOC-identifying families navigate today’s healthcare system.
Discrimination based on race is nothing new in healthcare, but the pandemic laid bare just how much race impacts a person’s health outcomes. In fact, Black and African American individuals are 1.1 times more likely to catch COVID-19, 2.9 times more likely to be hospitalized for it and 1.9 times more likely to die because of it than white individuals, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“This is not new to Cleo,” Dr. Chitra Akileswaran, cofounder and chief medical officer at Cleo, told