My personal awareness of racial disparities in health care dates to my boyhood in West Georgia. I was 8 or 9 and on a Sunday afternoon ramble when I encountered a tearful, African-American boy, perhaps 4 years old sitting on the steps of a ghetto cabin. His legs were badly burned and obviously infected. His mother told me that, days earlier, he had fallen into an inside fireplace. I ran to the house of a nearby white physician and reported what I had seen to the doctor’s wife. She dismissed me with the statement that residents of the ghetto never paid their medical bills. I learned a few weeks later that the little boy had died. I do not know if he ever received any treatment for his burns. I can still visualize his anguished face.
Clif CleavelandFor decades, racial and ethnic disparities in access and utilization of health care have persisted in our country. Although the gaps have narrowed since the introduction of Medicare, Medicaid, and reforms enacted under the Affordable Care Act, people of color – except for Asian-Americans – have shorter life-expectancies and carry a higher burden of disease than white people.
Racial and ethnic disparities in health care are more marked in this region compared to other parts of the country. A map of U.S. counties identifies the Central South extending into West Virginia as having the shortest life expectancies by a range of three to six years compared to healthier counties across the nation (http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com).
The U.S. life-expectancy for white residents is 79.1 years vs. 75.5 years for African-Americans. In Tennessee, white life expectacy is 76.7 vs. African-Americans’ 72.9. In Georgia, it’s 77.6 vs. 72.9, and in Alabama, 75.9 vs 72.9.
Disparities are seen across a spectrum of conditions: