Racial Health Disparities Exact Moral, Financial Toll On Nation

We suspected that there was more to racial health inequities than the moral argument, given the enormous social and psychic costs premature deaths impose on families and communities. The premature death of a working mother or father has negative effects on families that ripple throughout the economy in the form of lost income and wages, forgone taxes, increased need for social and community services and increased need for Social Security survivors' benefits.

There are some who believe that health disparities are due solely to genetic differences among racial groups or irresponsible behaviors among those who suffer higher rates of illness and death. However, this is not true. Health disparities are rooted in environmental and societal factors associated with poverty and discrimination. As the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation put it, health disparities have "more to do with your ZIP code than your genetic code."

The large number of premature deaths among American racial and ethnic minority groups represents a substantial loss of human potential, a loss of talent and productivity that might otherwise have contributed to the betterment of society. By imposing a substantial burden on the economy, health disparities visit suffering on the entire society, not just the minorities who live sicker and die younger.

But while the scope of the challenge in addressing these inequities is large, our research indicates that the same is true for the potential savings. Three hundred billion dollars a year is nothing to sneeze at. And while we continue to believe that the primary reason to act is a moral one, the enormous price tag of doing nothing may well sharpen the focus of all who are engaged in the current health care reform debate.

Usually we think of change as coming with costs, that doing something will cost more than doing what we are accustomed to doing. But in the case of America's unequal health, doing nothing has a cost - moral and fiscal - that our nation should not continue to bear.

Thomas A. LaVeist is the William C. and Nancy F. Richardson Professor in Health Policy and director of the Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. His e-mail is [e-mail]. Darrell J. Gaskin is associate professor of health economics in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Maryland and a faculty associate at the Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions and the Maryland Population Research Center. His e-mail is [e-mail].