Community Health Panel: Economic & Social Disparities in Health Care & Services @ 4:30 PM, Tuesday 1/14/14, Rockefeller 003

The passage and implementation of the Affordable Care Act, also known as "Obamacare," has placed issues of health care access in the spotlight. Building off the public debate surrounding Obamacare, the Los Angeles Poverty Department and Wunderbaum will be performing Hospital in Moore Theater on Friday and Saturday, January 17th and 18th at 8 pm. The US-Dutch theater collaboration will be bringing to the Hop "a raucous, inventive and engrossing multimedia ficto-commentary on the absurdities and outrages of modern medicine."

In order to preface the performance, the artists, in conjuction with local representatives, will conduct panel discussion open to the general public. John Malpede and Kevin Michael Key of the Skid Row-based Los Angeles Poverty Department, the Upper Valley Haven's Sara Kobylenski and Good Neighbor Health Clinic's Ceil Furlong will discuss and examine economic and social disparities in health care and access to health services in a community context with a special focus on wellness and health care in the Upper Valley, particularly as they relate to poverty.

Founded by John Malpede in 1985 in the wake of Los Angeles’ attempt to deport its homeless before the 1984 Olympics, LAPD was the first performance group in the nation made up principally of homeless people, and the first arts program of any kind for homeless people in Los Angeles. Skid Row is Los Angeles’ poorest area, with the largest concentration of homeless people of any neighborhood in the US. LAPD’s company members—recovering drug addicts and alcoholics, ex-convicts, and formerly homeless men and women—create performances and multidisciplinary artworks that connect the experience of people living in poverty to the social forces that shape their lives and communities. Since 2000, he’s been joined at the theater’s helm by Associate Director Henriëtte Brouwers, a performer, director, teacher and producer who trained in dance and theater in the Netherlands.

Please join us for the Community Health Panel at Rockefeller 003 at 4:30 pm, Tuesday, January 14, 2014.