Over the past half-century, understanding of health and health care disparities in the United States—including underlying social, clinical, and system-level contributors—has increased. Yet disparities persist. Eliminating health disparities will require a movement away from disparities as the focus of research and toward a research agenda centered on achieving racial equity by dismantling structural racism.
In the 1970s, the same decade that the Institute of Medicine (IOM), now the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), was founded, researchers began to see a clear pattern of disparities in the health of Black people and other minority groups as compared with White people in the United States. More Black people than White people died from cancer, for example, even as more effective treatments became available, and American Indians had substantially higher rates of diabetes than White people.
The above is an excerpt of a piece originally published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
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