Anyone who believes race is irrelevant when it comes to America’s healthcare system, must stop, and take the time to examine the cold grave facts.
Minorities, in the United States, are dying at higher rates from nearly every known disease when compared to Whites. They also suffer disproportionately from otherwise treatable illnesses. More often than not, this is a direct result of inadequate or non-existent access to healthcare.
The race issue insofar as political rhetoric spewed in the media by politicians and pundits alike, claims that minorities have it no worse when it comes to healthcare has worked.
The message continually spun indicates that color has no germane place in the dialog of healthcare. This only detracts from the fact that institutional racism still exists, thus leading to no tangible strongholds to ensure that healthcare in this country becomes colorblind. Just ask any person of color who has lost a loved one because they were too poor to see a doctor and forced to wait until their prognosis was fatal.
Historically, the experience that many minorities in the U.S. have had with healthcare has meant receiving reactive rather than proactive care at clinics, urgent care centers, and emergency rooms, costing the country more money with less care for all of us.
With the ever-failing economy, the majority of those who are uninsured are non-Whites. According to a recent study by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, “Unemployment rates are higher in communities of color; compared to whites, fewer people of color had healthcare coverage, and therefore, more difficulty accessing the healthcare system.”
Across all racial lines, Black males suffer the most due to poor or non-existent access to healthcare. According to recent data kept by the Centers of Disease Control (CDC) and the Office of Minority Health, although black males only make up a small percentage of the American population, they are more than twice as likely to die from prostate cancer when compared to White males.
They are also 30 percent more likely to die from heart disease, twice as likely to receive a diabetes diagnoses, and more than two times as likely to die from the disease.
According to the CDC, black males are 60 percent more likely to die from a stroke than whites are; and “[A larger number of] African-American stroke survivors become disabled, and [experience greater] difficulty with daily activities than non-Hispanic whites.”
The data is just as grim for African-American women when compared to white woman. Black women have a 34 percent higher chance of dying from breast cancer, are twice as likely to die from stomach cancer, and 22 times more likely to receive an HIV/AIDS diagnoses with a 20 percent higher death rate.
“Whites live an average of 5-7 times longer than blacks,” said Thomas A. LaVeist, Ph.D., author of “Minority Populations and Health: An Introduction to Health Disparities in the United States.” “African-Americans are also more likely than whites to be victims of homicide, and HIV/AIDS. Infant mortality is double for Blacks. It’s been that way since statistics were kept,” LaVeist says.
In 2007, Blacks accounted for 49 percent of HIV/AIDS cases, including more than seven times the AIDS rate of non-white Hispanic males.
“There is a powerful link between poverty, low socioeconomic status, and HIV,” said Dr. Kevin Fenton, director of the CDC’s National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STDs, and TB Prevention. “In communities with a generalized epidemic, we need to reach everyone in the community with prevention information and interventions,” Fenton said.
According to The World Health Organization, the United States spends more on healthcare than any industrialized country, but it ranks last in the quality of healthcare amongst 191 member nations. In rating a country’s overall quality of healthcare, one significant indicator of a population’s health is the infant mortality rate. Numbers are particularly grave for minority infants in the U.S. The grim statistics of the poor healthcare system poignantly reflects the high death rate of black infants, which is 2.3 times higher than white babies.
African-American babies are four times likely to die from low birth weight, and nearly two times the sudden infant death syndrome mortality rate as whites. In comparison to non-Hispanic white mothers, Black mothers are nearly three times as likely to wait until their third trimester to begin prenatal care, or receive no prenatal care at all.
Clearly, the inability to afford healthcare in an economy that creates job and home losses by everyone, but especially minorities and poor, middle class white Americans continues to go from bad to worse.
According to a report from The Kaiser Family Foundation, The Effects of the Economic Recession on Communities of Color, published July 2009, “Minority individuals are disproportionately affected by many of the consequences of the economic recession, such as the high unemployment rates, increased concern about paying for healthcare and coverage, housing, and food.”
The study also states that a “higher percentage of minority individuals report having issues obtaining a good-paying job, and losing work hours as a result of the economic downturn.”
While some 46 million Americans have no health insurance, one issue that cannot be denied are these statistics regarding the disproportionate number of African-Americans who are uninsured, proving that economic, institutional, and social barriers exist, and remain steadfast some 50 after the Civil Rights Movement reared its first monumental strides in 1955.
The late great Martin Luther King said, “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands in times of challenge and controversy.”
Let us heed King’s eloquent, and timeless words. We must do more than just apathetically hope that things will change. Rather, we must demand, and fight for reform on the forefront of one of America’s most epochal battlegrounds. All people must have the basic right to live healthy, and wholeheartedly experience this country’s most robust principal of, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” We can all realize this pursuit, regardless of the color of one’s skin.