“If you want to see structural racism, just look at big city hospitals during COVID. Hospitals with a history of serving communities of color needed refrigerator trucks to hold bodies of deceased patients, while wealthier hospitals nearby had empty beds,” said Vikas Saini, president of the Lown Institute. More
"If you arrived from another planet and saw two airports a mile apart, one for Black people and another for whites, you'd think this is some kind of weird apartheid," Saini told MedPage Today. "We don't do that for airports, but somehow that's where we've ended up with hospitals, and everyone knows it. If you want an illustration of what structural racism is, this is it," he said. "The results are outlandish." More
Covid-caused delays in medical treatments and surgeries are producing data for health care providers to take another look at what’s needed and what isn’t. More
New rankings identify the most and least racially inclusive U.S. hospitals. Sometimes they are just blocks apart. More
When Douglas McClain contracted COVID-19, his experience with the health care system mirrored that of far too many Black people. More
There's a lot of room for dangerous misunderstanding when doctors and public health officials talk to diverse groups about COVID-19. Health literacy projects aim to dispel confusion in all languages. More
The government has so far paid Emergent BioSolutions $271 million, even though American regulators have yet to clear a single dose of vaccine produced at its manufacturing plant in Baltimore. More
Some vaccinated at Banner Health sites in Tucson have received $71 bills. Banner says the bills were a mistake and that anyone who paid them can get their money back. More
Insurers and Congress wrote rules to protect coronavirus patients, but the bills came anyway, leaving some mired in debt. More
Colorado health officials so abhor the high costs associated with free-standing emergency rooms they’re offering to pay hospitals to shut the facilities down. The state wants hospitals to convert them to other purposes, such as providing primary care or mental health services. More
The pandemic barely dented the financial outlook for some major networks, which continued to acquire weaker hospitals and ailing doctors’ practices. Critics worry consolidation leads to higher prices for medical care. More
Let us begin anew with language that reinforces equitable access to care and treatment of African American and Latinx patients, their families, communities, clinicians, and care teams. More
Today, there is more recognition than ever of the influence of structural forces on maternal and infant health and a heightened willingness to address those factors in a meaningful way. We cannot afford to waste this opportunity. More
Black Americans’ vaccination rates still trail all other groups, while Hispanics show improvement. Native Americans show the strongest rates nationally. More
In this issue of JAMA Cardiology, Berman and colleagues examined data from 2 major academic hospitals in Boston, Massachusetts, and found that despite receiving initial care in the same facilities, individuals who lived in poor neighborhoods had strikingly higher cardiovascular mortality after a myocardial infarction than did individuals who lived in more affluent neighborhoods. More
More education typically leads to better health, yet Black men in the U.S. are not getting the same benefit as other groups, research suggests. More
This has been a year like none other for Dr. Rebecca Elon, who has dedicated her professional life to helping older adults. More
One of America's largest hospital chains, Community Health Systems, has filed at least 19,000 lawsuits against patients in the last year, a CNN investigation finds. More
The financial gap between wealthy hospitals and safety-net hospitals, which take everyone who walks through their doors, has widened during the pandemic, an NPR and PBS Frontline investigation found. More
When Dr. Lown came to Baltimore for medical school in 1942, he found that everything was segregated -- even the blood at the hospital's blood bank. Watch the video and read the blog below to hear in Dr. Lown's own words how he rebelled against this racist practice. More