Hypothesis That Race, Education, and Socioeconomic Status Have an Effect on Healthcare Disparities in the US - Research Paper Example

At the beginning of 2008, the U.S. Census Bureau announced that the country’s minority population has exceeded 1000 million, suggesting that 1 in 3 U.S. citizens are nonwhite. Of the nonwhites, the lion’s share of the population is of Hispanic origin totaling 44 million. Hispanics comprise roughly 15% of the U.S. overall population, followed by Blacks topping at 40 million. With the expected level of population explosion, the U.S. Census Bureau predicts that in the near future, half the population will be nonwhite.

This foresight substantiates the importance of this study. Many studies have established the fact that minority patients receive poorer quality of care. This fact was confirmed by the 1999 Institute of Medicine’s report, Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and ethnic disparities in health care, which says that patients of different ethnicities received different levels of care even when all other factors such as health status, insurance coverage, education, and income were the same. Thus, it is an undeniable fact that improvement in the quality of healthcare can be achieved only after removing the disparities in healthcare.

(Risa Lavizzo, 2008). Every year the number of deaths occurring in the U.S. due to preventable disease increases. It becomes impervious to attack the historic perspective of various disparities seen in public health as it is a matter of life and death for individuals. It also has to be understood that disparities in health among different racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups in the United States are real and represent a serious threat to our future as a nation. The gravity of the issue can be understood from the fact that an African-American baby born in the U.S. is 2.

5 times more likely to die before its first birthday than a white baby. Also, in 2000, there were 83,500 more African-Americans that died than would have died if disparities were eliminated. Following this startling statistic, the President came up with an agenda, Healthy People 2010, to research and eradicate health disparities ( David Satcher & Eve J. Higginbotham, 2008)