Years of efforts to reduce the racial disparities in health care have so far failed to eliminate them. But progress is being made in the western United States, due largely to efforts by managed care plans to identify patients who were missing out on management of chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease.
While management of blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar improved nationwide, African-Americans still "substantially" trailed whites everywhere except the western U.S., an area from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific as well as Alaska and Hawaii.
"We were certainly hoping we would see indications of progress in eliminating disparities in the country as a whole," said Dr. John Ayanian, who heads the Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation at the University of Michigan and was lead author of the study. While it was "disappointing" that disparities persisted, he said, "it's also heartening to see that ... in the West, the disparities had been eliminated, and that was both surprising and encouraging."
[For more of this story, written by Lisa Aliferis, go to http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/12/17/371410622/managed-care-plans-make-progress-in-erasing-racial-disparities]
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