Opinion: Hospital financing in black and white
During our training as doctors, we have rotated through safety-net hospitals, elite academic medical centers, and private clinics. The resources for patient care and comfort were sumptuous in some facilities, spartan in others. The differences were often night and day or, as we quantified in a later analysis, black and white: we cared for far more white patients at highly resourced facilities and many more Black patients and other patients of color at those with fewer resources.
While the 1964 Civil Rights Act forbade hospitals from discriminating based on race, segregation persists. According to Medicare data we analyzed, a relative handful of hospitals — just 10% of all hospitals — provide three-quarters of all care for Black people covered by Medicare.
Read Original Article: Opinion: Hospital financing in black and white »
