Blacks At A Healthcare Disadvantage Say Medical Experts

By Aaron Richardson

The U.S. Civil Rights Commission held a briefing on the health disparities of minorities today in Washington D.C.  A panel of notable health care and policy professionals gave extensive testimony on everything from how different races are more likely to suffer from different diseases to the reasons why African Americans have a lower life expectancy rate than whites.
Some of the statistics presented at this briefing were staggering.

Dr. Garth Graham, The Deputy Assistant Secretary for Minority Health, stated that even though life expectancy is increasing for Americans in general, African Americans receive inferior medial care.

“Racial and ethnic minorities receive a lower quality of care compared to whites across a wide range of preventative, diagnostic and therapeutic services.” said Graham.

Dr. Amitah Chandra, Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, explained why African Americans and other minorities do not get the same quality health care opportunities as Whites.

“Stereotyping is just one manifestation of these indiscretions and it occurs when a provider uses a patients race to produce information about the benefit of treatment.  If for example, African American patients on average are more likely not to be compliant then a physician may assume that her African American patient is less compliant. Such reasonings will worsen the outcome for that patient.”

Peter B. Bach of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center spoke about the difference in cancer treatments between minorities andnon-minorities.

“We show that in medicare, Blacks with a curable diagnosis receive the surgery 13 percent less often than whites with the same diagnosis. We showed this was not due to social-economic status and we also showed that this treatment gap is the explanation for blacks poor survival outcomes in lung cancer.”

A member of the Commission, Ashley Taylor Jr. responded by saying, “I am concerned about what I hear that minorities are clustered among a certain number of physicians. I am not a physician but I am a consumer and I want to know why there is not more discussion about this clustering and why black people are not told that in large part the outcome of your situation depends upon where you’re going.”