Assignment 16-Weaver

 

Maggie Weaver

Logsdon

AP Lang and Comp

12 December 2020

Racial Disparities in Healthcare: An Annotated Bibliography

Bridges, Khiara M. “Implicit Bias and Racial Disparities in Health Care.” American Bar Association, 7 Dec. 2018, www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/the-state-of-healthcare-in-the-united-states/racial-disparities-in-health-care/. 

In this article written by Bridges, a law and anthropology professor at Boston University, published by the American Bar Association, she addresses how even if African Americans aren’t in the poverty that they disproportionately face, they still receive less quality care than an economically comparable white person. Some examples of this are that minorities are less likely to receive “appropriate cardiac care, to receive kidney dialysis or transplants, and to receive the  best treatments for stroke, cancer, and AIDS.” An explanation for this can be found in biases that medical professionals hold. When the people prescribing the make or break treatments to patients have their own subconscious perceptions of minorities, they make them a contributing factor in how they choose to treat these patients which in turn makes their chosen prescriptions less effective because they are clouded with prejudice. This can be seen in black patients even when all other factors such as economic factors and housing are controlled, and they are discharged earlier than is appropriate after surgery, less likely to receive chemotherapy, and even worse they receive unwanted treatments more than white people such as amputations and uneffective antipsychotics that are harmful long term. This article is helpful for my research topic because it shows that it's not just outside factors that affect race like economic status and housing that affect how african American patients are treated, but the preconceived perceptions that medical professionals have directly harm minorities no matter if all other factors except for race are the same. 

Lewis, Sarah. “The Racial Divide: Acknowledging and addressing disparities in healthcare.” Audio blog post. Hartford HealthCare Podcast. Hartford HealthCare, 23 Jul. 2020. Web. 15 December 2020.

`In this podcast by Lewis, the VP of Health Equity at Hartford Healthcare, the publisher of the podcast. In this podcast Lewis addresses how the nation as a whole contributes to the disparities in healthcare that affects minorities and what we should do to try and help. She addresses the life expectancy differences between African Americans and caucasian people, and how it goes across genders and affects everyone. The lack of healthcare contributes to this because the quality of hospitals in segregated healthcare is less in segregated neighborhoods with moniorites than areas of white people, and even if everyone went to the same hospital the quality of treatment would still be different. Another thing she emphasizes is the importance of data in telling the story of racial disparities in healthcare. By encouraging healthcare workers and hospitals to collect data on demographics and illnesses, specifically with COVID-19, it would help to see how race, social circumstances, and economic status contributes to illness so that workers can see which areas are most affected and therefore be able to focus on them more and give them the care they need. This podcast is helpful for my research topic because it shows the perspective of someone whos whole career is trying to take accountability for the negative racial bias in healthcare, and it also helps because it is showing how this is effecting everyone today because of the COVID-19 pandemic so we need to try and fix this issue as soon as possible with the solutions she proposed like taking data.

Orgera, Kendal, et al. “Disparities in Health and Health Care: Five Key Questions and Answers.” KFF, Kaiser Family Foundation, 1 Apr. 2020, www.kff.org/racial-equity-and-health-policy/issue-brief/disparities-in-health-and-health-care-five-key-questions-and-answers/. 

In this article by Orgera, a senior data analyst, published by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a non-partisan American non-profit organization, she discusses the data on how minorities are affected by racial disparities. She first explains why it matters in the first place, and states how America is becoming more and more racially diverse so these issues will start to affect even more of the population. She then goes on to present data for various health issues, and shows how disproportionately minorities are affected by them compared to white people, such as how HIV, AIDS, and the death rate for them is exponentially greater for African Americans than white people. It also delves deeper into the social issues surrounding minorities and their lack of adequate care. Minorities are exponentially less insured, delayed seeing doctors due to cost, and are much more affected by social determinants of health. These social determinants are huge factors to why minorities don’t receive treatment, with lots of issues which she grouped into economic stability, neighborhood and physical environment, education, food, community and social context, and health care systems. While providing all of this extremely helpful data on the social issues and demographics as well as physical health, she also includes tons of infographics that make the information a lot easier to read and digest. This article is helpful for my research topic because it is a great overview on what is affecting minorities in healthcare and answering questions like: “Why should that matter to me?” that a lot of people are asking, but it also includes lots of infographics with relevant information that I can incorporate into my presentation to make it much easier and more interesting to understand.

Sivashanker, Karthik, et al. “A Data-Driven Approach to Addressing Racial Disparities in Health Care Outcomes.” Harvard Business Review Digital Articles, July 2020, pp. 2–6. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,cipd,url custid=s1176192&db=buhAN=144821169.

In this article by Sivashanker published in the Harvard Business Review, an academic journal, he discusses how minorities are disproportionately affected by illness, specifically the COVID-19 pandemic. It is shown that in counties where they are predominately African American (over 86%) their death rate is 10 times as high as other counties. It doesn’t just impact African Americans, though, because as well as African Americans, the Native American and Alaska Native populations were five times more likely to get COVID-19 than the causcasion population, and the Latino population 4 times more likely. The article also points out that in pandemics such as this, there are many other issues that will soon be discovered to be factors of this health crisis, such as “language, income, and insurance status” that will also put people, but specifically minorities, at a disadvantage. This article is also very helpful in the fat that it not only addresses the disparities, but shows how the author’s hospitals decided to address them and what worked for them,which includes using data analysis and making visuals and then tailoring what they’ve found to their audience in order to get their point across and then used an existing reporting system to fix these issues. This article will be useful for my research topic because it not only addresses the multiracial disparities and the other factors that contribute, but it also gives solutions to the issues that have already been tested in a medical setting. 

Yearby, Ruqaiijah. “Racial Disparities in Health Status and Access to Healthcare: The Continuation of Inequality in the United States Due to Structural Racism.” American Journal of Economics & Sociology, vol. 77, no. 3/4, May 2018, pp. 1113–1152. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1111/ajes.12230.

In this article published by the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, a peer-reviewed academic journal, Yearby discusses how racism affects multiple factors of a person's life such as wealth, employment, income, and healthcare. Yearby points out that even though people have the idea that structural racism is long gone, it is actually still a prevalent issue in today's society. In specifically healthcare, there are many examples of how institutional racism is still going strong, one being medical care quality. Racial segregation in neighborhoods contributes to quality of care, because segragated neighborhoods have a “disproportionate” amount of African Americans that undergo surgery in lower quality hospitals, but in non segregated neighborhoods it is the same rate for both African Americans and caucasian people. Another issue is food availability which leads to many major health complications. In racially segregated neighborhoods there is a lack of healthy choices and supermarkets, and instead there’s a surplus of fast food chains and convenience stores that are cheaper. These affect these areas greatly, because there is then a much higher rate for obesity which can then lead to cancer and heart disease. This article is useful for my research topic because it shows the many factors that are working against minorities when it comes to health and healthcare and also highlights areas that need to be fixed in order to solve this problem.