WASHINGTON — When it comes to eliminating the racial disparities that plague America’s health care system and cause Blacks to “live sicker and die quicker” than Whites, University of Colorado law professor Dayna Matthew believes the cure is to be found in the law.
“Law changes social norms and the social norm needs to be changed in this country,” Matthew said during a lecture at Politics & Prose, a downtown bookstore where she discussed her recently released book, “Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care.”
“Changing the social norm matters. (In) Brown versus Board of Education, we changed the social norm about explicit prejudice and racism in this country,” Matthew said of the landmark decision that ended legal segregation in America’s public schools. “We need to change the social norm about implicit, unconscious racism, unintentional racism also.”
Matthew contends that America’s health care system is beset by unconscious bias and implicit racism. To bolster her point, she cited a study by former U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher and others that found that an estimated 84,000 “excess deaths” could be prevented each year in the United States if the Black-White “mortality gap” were eliminated.
She also cited “Unequal Treatment”—an Institute of Medicine study that found that racial and ethnic minorities get a lower quality of health care in the U.S.—and other studies that discovered that physicians who were found to have implicit bias tend to prescribe inferior treatment plans to patients of color.
To eliminate such disparities, Matthew espouses making changes with respect to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
First, Matthew said, implicit or unconscious bias or unintentional racism should become “actionable” under the act.
