Racial Health Disparities Exact Moral, Financial Toll On Nation

The health-care reform bills making their way through Congress have focused on improving access to care for millions of uninsured Americans while slowing rapidly rising health-care costs. But there is another side to the health-care crisis that has been mostly neglected.

A study that we performed for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington-based think tank, found that, between 2003 and 2006, 30.6 percent of medical care expenditures for African-Americans, Asians and Hispanics were excess costs that were the result of inequities in the health of these groups. Between 2003 and 2006, the combined direct and indirect cost of health disparities in the United States was $1.24 trillion (in 2008 inflation-adjusted dollars). This is more than the gross domestic product of India and equates to $309.3 billion annually lost to the economy.

In 2002, the Institute of Medicine released "Unequal Treatment," a comprehensive report that documented extraordinary disparities in the quality of health care received by the various American racial and ethnic groups. Since then, health-care advocacy groups have relied on a compelling social justice argument to press policymakers to direct resources to efforts to address racial and ethnic inequities in health, with the premise that doing so is in keeping with American values.

The social justice argument has mainly garnered support on the political left, but it has also found some friends on the right. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich wrote in his recent book, "Real Change: From The World That Fails To The World That Works": "A key test for any new system is its ability to provide access to quality care for the poorest and sickest among us. The elimination of health disparities must be a critical goal: No American can be left out." And former President George W. Bush has said, "African American males die sooner than other males do, which means the system is inherently unfair to a certain group of people. And that needs to be fixed."

Of course, President Bush's words were not stated within the context of announcing a new health initiative to "fix" the problem. Rather, he was trying to win support among blacks for his effort to privatize Social Security by noting that African-American men often die prematurely - thus losing out on Social Security benefits - and proposing that families be able to inherit the balance of a deceased worker's Social Security account.