Racial and Regional Disparities in Health Care Getting More Attention

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation aims to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in health care, through a new $300 million program to improve care in 14 communities.

The New York Times reported on the program, along with a new study from Dartmouth that was commissioned by the foundation.

The study, by researchers at Dartmouth, examined Medicare claims for evidence of racial and geographic disparities and found that on a variety of quality indices, blacks typically were less likely to receive recommended care than whites within a given region. But the most striking disparities were found from place to place.

For instance, the widest racial gaps in mammogram rates within a state were in California and Illinois, with a difference of 12 percentage points between the white rate and the black rate. But the country’s lowest rate for blacks — 48 percent in California — was 24 percentage points below the highest rate — 72 percent in Massachusetts. The statistics were for women ages 65 to 69 who received screening in 2004 or 2005.

In all but two states, black diabetics were less likely than whites to receive annual hemoglobin testing. But blacks in Colorado (66 percent) were far less likely to be screened than those in Massachusetts (88 percent).

The role of race and culture plays in health care has been receiving a lot of media attention recently. HFA is in the process of planning our 2009 teleconference, which focuses on the impact of racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity in end-of-life care. We will post more information about the teleconference in upcoming months.