Bronx Health Reach 2005 testimony
Program note: For more insight on race and the health care system, tune in tonight for Dr. Sanjay Gupta's segment "Medical Apartheid". He goes in depth with two patients who are victims of racial disparity. Watch AC360° tonight 10p ET and on Tuesday and Wednesday, 8p ET for Black In America.
Neil Calman, MD and Maxine Golub, MPH
Bronx Health Reach
Bronx Health REACH is a coalition comprised of 30 community-based organizations and 14 faith-based groups dedicated to eliminating racial disparities in health outcome. The Coalition has been working together since 1999, first examining the causes of racial disparities in the community through focus groups and literature reviews, and then implementing community based initiatives to address specific concerns such as diet and exercise, diabetes management, public health education, provider education, and legal and regulatory issues. The Coalition has trained community health advocates and faith-based
health coordinators to assist in these efforts.
The unfortunate reality is that people of color in this country suffer worse health outcomes than whites in virtually every measure of health, regardless of economic and insurance status. Blacks and Latinos are more likely to be under and uninsured, report greater
difficulty obtaining health care services, and suffer significantly worse health outcomes, including shorter life spans and increased deaths from preventable illnesses.
These disparities have been carefully documented by The Institute of Medicine, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Commonwealth Fund. Bronx Health REACH has identified a number of factors that contribute to racial disparities in health outcomes.
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Filed under: Black in America • Health Care |
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I expected more from CNN. This report did not go into any details of other white people of lower income and their health and how they are treated. Nor did it inquire into how many times these people went to see their general doctor every year for an annual physical. This is a key issue.
I beleive that hospitals, like business, can and need to give different care depending on how wthey a re being paid. I did expect CNN to report on the business of healthcare, showing how difficult it is for doctors to make ends meet with payments from insurance, specifically, medicare and medicaid going down.
If I am paying for private health insurance I better get the best care. IF you are on the gov'ernments dime you get what you get. Learn to be an advocate for yourelf. That is what it takes today for anyone.
If you want to see change speak to the government and ask them to increase the reimbursement rates they pay to doctors to even out the playing field. Doctors year over year are taking pay cuts, due to rates medicare and medicade pay.
CNN and AC360 – start speaking to doctors like Dr. Mitchell Strominger, who goes to bat for his patients, but is making less year over yead since the insurance companies keep reducing the amount the pay. Speak to doctors who spend more money every year filling out more paperwork and wasting money. What does this do the quality of care? It certainly does not help. . Medicine is not racist, it is business.
I expect to see more "reports" like this, seeing that in this “post-racial” era not enough Whites have embraced their inner martyr and accepted responsibility for everyone else's problems.
A recent study revealed that blacks and Hispanics have higher rates of obesity than Whites. You'd never have known that from CNN's recent "Obesity in America" stories, which only ran photos of overweight Whites. It's not a coincidence that Mississippi, the "fattest" state, also has the highest AA population, percentage-wise (36%).
The black doctor quoted in "Duo Helps Black Men Fight Prostate Cancer," a current CNN story, attributes the increased risk of said cancer among AA men to genetics, and he didn't feel any need to bring environment into the picture. This is in contrast to White researchers and medical practitioners, who invariably act as if they are required to downplay genetics and emphasize malign outside influences.