Black Americans get fewer operations, tests, medications and other life-saving treatments than white Americans and have less access to the best doctors, hospitals and health plans, according to three studies published yesterday.
The studies show that major disparities still exist between the healthcare offered to black and white people in the United States, despite years of effort to erase racial gaps in the system.
However, the research also shows that the healthcare gap is closing on many simple, cheap medical treatments.
”We have known for 20 years that we have a problem in our healthcare system: that black and white people do not receive equal care,” Ashish Jha of the Harvard School of Public Health, which led one of the studies, told The Washington Post. ”We had hoped all the attention paid to this topic would result in some improvement. What we found is we have not made much progress.”
Black people remain much less likely to undergo heart bypass operations, appendectomies and other common procedures, although researchers found narrowed racial gaps for mammograms and diabetes tests and treatment. Gaps were also reduced for prescribing beta-blocker heart drugs and testing cholesterol after heart attacks.
Since the 1980s, many studies have documented racial gaps in the standard of healthcare. Black people are significantly more prone to illness, experience more complications when they do get sick and take longer to recover. The differences have been blamed on economic, cultural and even biological differences.
The latest studies were not designed to pinpoint the reasons for the gaps.
However, researchers said more elaborate treatments took longer to improve because they involved multiple steps and resources and required coordination between doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies. – Guardian Unlimited Â