Racial disparities persist in U.S. cancer treatment

U.S. blacks continue to get inferior cancer treatment compared to whites, researchers said on Monday in a study showing that disparities first documented in the early 1990s persist despite efforts to erase them.

The researchers assessed the type of treatment given to more than 143,000 Americans over age 65 for lung, breast, colon, rectal and prostate cancer from 1992 to 2002 under the Medicare government health insurance program.

Black patients were consistently less likely than whites to receive the recommended types of treatment, the study found, and the problem was just as bad in 2002 as in 1992.

The findings were published in the journal Cancer, published by the American Cancer Society.

Reuters - Read Full Text

Palmbeach Post (08/05)

The diagnosis did not get better with the second opinion. Or the third.

African-Americans, according to three studies published in Thursday's New England journal of Medicine, still get poorer health care than whites, fewer heart and back surgeries, fewer hip or knee replacements, fewer expensive treatments, fewer tests. Women are less likely than men to get good care, and, the researchers found, black women get the worst care of all.

"We have known for 20 years that we have a problem in our health-care system, that blacks and whites do not receive equal care," said Dr. Ashish Jha of the Harvard School of Public Health. He led one of the studies. "We had hoped that all the attention paid to this topic would result in some improvement. What we found is that we have not made much progress."

...

The three most recent studies are reminiscent of a 2002 report by the Institute of Medicine, which found widespread racial disparities in treating heart disease, prostate cancer, emergencies and HIV/AIDS, even when blacks' income and insurance were the same as whites.

...

Blacks are diagnosed less and die more.

Unfortunately, that is no longer opinion. It's fact.