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BREAKING NEWS FROM THE BOSTON GLOBE
IS THIS THE FUTURE OF OBAMACARE?
OBAMACARE WAS BASED
ON ROMNEYCARE
Simply put: If you are black in Boston,
you are less likely to get care at several of the city’s elite hospitals than if you are white.
“Patients fly in from all over the country to get care at Massachusetts General Hospital. Yet, most black Bostonians don’t travel the five to 10 miles from their neighborhoods to take advantage of the hospital’s immense medical resources. Just 11 percent of Bostonians admitted to the city’s largest hospital are black, far less than its peers.
Though the issue gets scant attention in this center of world-class medicine, segregation patterns are deeply imbedded in Boston health care. Simply put: If you are black in Boston, you are less likely to get care at several of the city’s elite hospitals than if you are white.
As part of its examination of whether Boston deserves its reputation as inhospitable to blacks, the Spotlight Team probed the forces driving segregation patterns in health care. The team obtained patient discharge and hospital employment data not generally available to the public, created databases, interviewed national researchers, and spoke to more than 50 black Bostonians about their health care experiences, and the conclusions were inescapable:
Despite a decade of intense and in some cases successful efforts by city leaders and high-ranking hospital officials to improve health care for minorities, certain patterns of segregation remain stubbornly entrenched, threatening to undermine the region’s mission of equitable care for everyone.
Massachusetts’ first-in-the-nation law mandating health insurance coverage, designed to increase equity in medical care, appears to have created greater — not less — hospital segregation, according to a scholarly paper published last year. The law increased the number of blacks with health insurance, and with that, potential access to a broader array of hospitals.”
READ: apps.bostonglobe.com/spotlight/boston-racism-image-reality/series/hospitals/
The LOWE-Down!
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