Racial Disparties in Health

Newsweek reports on why racial disparties in health care persist:

It’s been more than a decade since Congress first officially acknowledged that this country has a problem with race and health. In 1999 the government asked the Institute of Medicine—an independent nonprofit whose reports are the gold standard for health-care policymakers—to investigate disparities in health and health care among racial and ethnic minorities. The results were damning: the ensuing study, called Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care, found that minorities had poorer health and were consistently getting lower-quality care even when factors such as insurance status and income weren’t involved. They were less likely to get lifesaving heart medications, bypass surgery, dialysis, or kidney transplants. They were more likely to get their feet and legs amputated as a treatment for late-stage diabetes. Clearly, something needed to be done.

In the years since the report, the issue has gotten plenty of publicity, more reports have come out, and several agencies—including the National Center on Minority Health—have examined the problem and suggested solutions. Still, studies continue to turn up disturbing disparities.

Yale University recently released a study featured in the Archives of Surgery indicating that minority patients in New York City appear less likely than white patients to have surgeries performed by surgeons or at facilities that have handled large numbers of similar procedures in the past.

Racial and ethnic differences in medical care and health outcomes have been widely documented, according to background information in the article. “One specific concern is whether minorities disproportionately receive treatment from lower-quality providers,” the authors write. “While measuring quality accurately is difficult, research has shown mortality [death] to be inversely related to hospital and surgeon volume for many surgical procedures.”

Newsweek goes on:

So why, now that everyone’s aware of the problem, do we still have one? Mostly, the reason is that health and race are both complicated issues to examine academically. Put them together, and constructing a study design that can tease apart all the issues and make sense of the data is an enormous challenge. In other words, we still don’t really know what’s causing a lot of these disparities, much less what to do about them.  Continue reading to find out why.

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