Closing the care gap
If a jetliner carrying 260 African-Americans crashed every day for a year, the toll would approximate the impact of unequal access to health care and the resulting poorer health outcomes on the nation’s African-American community. Such health disparities also affect Latinos, Asian-Americans, American Indians, and other minority groups. Collectively, their illnesses and premature deaths not only devastate loved ones, they also carry an enormous economic cost, more than $1 trillion from 2003 to 2006, according to a 2009 report by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. Such stark statistics were offered to illustrate the stubborn problem of disparities in health between America’s white and minority communities during a University-wide symposium at the Center for Government and International Studies’ Tsai Auditorium Thursday. “It is a social justice issue,” said symposium panelist David Williams, Norman Professor of Public Health at the Harvard School of Public Health and professor of African and African American...