Blacks Suffer from Disparities in Health Care

Inferior qualifications and less access  to resources among doctors who treat black patients may  contribute to racial disparities in the quality of U.S. health  care, authors of a study said on Wednesday. The study, published in Thursday's New England Journal of  Medicine, found that many of the doctors treating black  patients complain they don't have the resources to adequately  care for them. "The findings paint a picture of two health systems, where  physicians treating black patients appear to have less access  to important clinical resources and be less well-trained  clinically than physicians treating white patients," said study  leader Peter Bach of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center  in New York. Bach and his team found that about a fifth of U.S. doctors  - 22 percent - are treating four-fifths of the country's black  population. Moreover, 86 percent of the doctors visited by  white patients tended to have advanced training, versus 77  percent of the doctors who tended to treat black patients, the  Bach team said. [more]