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Reducing Racial, Ethnic, and Socioeconomic Disparities in Health Care: Opportunities in National Health Reform

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Marsha Lillie-Blanton ,
Saqi Maleque  and
Wilhelmine Miller
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Extract

As this nation embarks on new efforts to reform the U.S. health system, we face a critical unfinished agenda from the mid- 1960s: persistent racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in health and health care. Medicaid, Medicare, and Community Health Centers — public programs with very different legislative histories and financing mechanisms — were the first federally funded, nationwide efforts to improve health care access for low-income and elderly Americans. Members of racial and ethnic minority groups also greatly benefited from these efforts because recipients of federal funds, such as Medicare, were required to comply with the newly passed Civil Rights Act of 1964, which barred racial discrimination. Unquestionably, government played a major role in the gains in health care access that have occurred in the last half century. Yet today all Americans do not have the same opportunities for health, access to care, or quality of care when they receive it.

Type
Symposium
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , Winter 2008 , pp. 693 - 702
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2008

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