"When you leave out the door": The streets, Medicaid, and boundary spaces of healthcare in urban poverty.

Abstract

Attending closely to the lived experiences of people moving in and out of Medicaid-funded institutions, I argue that "the streets" are critical to understanding healthcare in US urban poverty. Exploring the relationship between "the streets" and Medicaid-funded institutions, this essay asks: How does the relationship between "the streets"-and in the words of my research interlocutors-"life on the other side" shape life in Medicaid-funded institutions in the Northeast US city? How do the social and symbolic conditions of this relationship-conditions structured by anti-Blackness-formulate the human in urban poverty? By joining Medicaid-funded institutions together as a broader health-governing network, I demonstrate how these institutions become boundary spaces that reveal the socially and symbolically interdependent worlds of "the streets" and life off them. Ultimately, this essay argues that "the streets" contain the social and symbolic conditions that dehumanize the poor through the logics of anti-Blackness, thus defining the terms of humanization that Medicaid-funded institutions afford.