Crossing the Gap

A doctor, a disinvested neighborhood, and a radical experiment to close America’s death gap. 

Two girls are born in the same Chicago hospital. Their neighborhoods, only seven train stops apart, carve their destinies and their life spans. One will live to eighty-five; the other will not reach sixty-five. Crossing the Gap asks how a city that boasts world-class hospitals can tolerate an epidemic of early death—and what it would take to end it.

With his landmark book, The Death Gap, physician and health equity leader David A. Ansell exposed how structural racism and poverty drive people to an early grave. In Crossing the Gap, he goes beyond diagnosis to show what happens when a major medical center decides that the real disease is disinvestment—and that the cure must be jobs, wealth-building, and power-sharing. As chief health equity officer at Rush University Medical Center, Ansell joins pastors, organizers, and young leaders on Chicago’s West Side to flip the script on what a hospital owes its neighbors. He powerfully argues that everyone should have the chance to be healthy and shows that closing America’s death gap is not only about health, but about the future of our democracy itself.

Part medical memoir, part urban chronicle, Crossing the Gap follows bold efforts like West Side United and the Sankofa Wellness Village, revealing how community voice, data, and moral imagination can move health systems from bystanders to change agents—not just in one city, but across the nation.