I’ve invited Niko Karvounis, a colleague at The Century Foundation, to guest-blog. Niko is currently a Program Assistant at the Foundation and an Alumnus Senior Fellow with the Roosevelt Institution. His post follows below.
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Recently I was handed a report from Bronx Health Reach (BHR) entitled “Separate and Unequal: Medical Apartheid in New York City” that reveals some startling inequities right here in the so-called capital of the world.
Bronx Health Reach is a coalition formed by the Institute for Urban Family Health, with the mission of examining and addressing racial and ethnic health disparities in the southwest Bronx portion of NYC.
At the local level in the Big Apple, these disparities play out through discriminatory care tied to health coverage. Since “health insurance is a major determinant of access to medical care,” poor insurance increases the probability of “delayed care and poorer health outcomes.” And in NYC, health insurance status is closely linked to race: “52 percent of blacks, 63 percent of Latinos” and only “24 percent of whites are uninsured or publicly insured.” This skewed distribution of health coverage ultimately “creates a de facto sorting of patients by race.”
The most compelling evidence of apartheid can be found in the records of medical institutions which reveal the characteristics of patients that they admit and discharge.