Abysmal Health Care for Black Women

You know if I didn’t know better I would swear we were under siege. Where the hell is the health care for Black Women?

Kendra Lee: Choice Magazine

Black women are in the vanguard of those receiving inferior health care, with greater incidence of and mortality from nearly every major disease, including diabetes, heart disease, HIV/AIDS, hypertension, and some forms of cancer:

* Diabetes rates have tripled among African Americans over the past three decades. Nearly 12 percent of black women over 20 and 25 percent of those over 55 have this condition.

* Forty percent of black women have high blood pressure.

* Black women are 69 percent more likely to have heart disease and heart attacks, and they have a 70 percent greater chance of dying of heart disease.

* Black women accounted for 69 percent of new HIV diagnoses from 2000 to 2003 and have a rate of HIV/AIDS infection that is 18 times higher than that of white women.

* Although cancer is the second-leading cause of death for all women, black women have the greatest number of deaths from cancer of the breast, colon, pancreas, and stomach.

"We're always at the bottom rung. We have the worst health of any group of women across most diseases and across all of the leading health indicators," says Lorraine Cole, head of the Black Women's Health Imperative. "We're dying too often, too soon, and unnecessarily."

When researchers analyzed data from 1991 to 2000 they discovered that more than 800,000 African Americans died during that decade because they didn't receive the same health care as their white counterparts.

According to the study, "The Health Impact of Resolving Racial Disparities: An Analysis of U.S. Mortality Data," age-adjusted mortality rates for white men and women averaged 29 percent and 24 percent lower, respectively, than those of blacks. The authors reported that though technological advances during the decade saved roughly 176,000 lives, five times more lives could be saved if racial disparities are erased.

Some of these disparities are the direct result of reduced access to health care. Blacks are more likely to be "uninsured, underinsured, and underserved," says David Satcher, former U.S. Surgeon General, current director of the National Center for Primary Care at Morehouse School of Medicine, and a study co-author.

When African Americans do receive care, it is often of lesser quality. "We have evidence that physicians treat blacks differentially in ways that disadvantage black patients," says Jay Kaufman, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina who studies health disparities. "Blacks are seen less often by specialists, receive less appropriate preventive care -- [for example] mammography and influenza vaccinations -- lower-quality/less intensive hospital care, fewer cardiovascular procedures, fewer lung resections for cancer, fewer kidney and bone marrow transplants, fewer orthopedic procedures, fewer antiretrovirals for HIV infection, fewer antidepressants for depression, fewer admissions for chest pain, lower-quality prenatal care."

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