Structural Racism in US Healthcare: Disparities and Solutions

“Since the Jim Crow era (1875–1968), racism has become an integral part of the United States government structure and financing of the health care system. Federal programs, such as the Medical Assistance for the Aged program (also known as Kerr-Mills), that are committed to serving the poor are underfunded, especially in states that have a large black population (Yearby et al., 2022).” “As of November 2021, American Indian and Alaska Native, Black, and Latino people all had suffered from higher rates of hospitalizations and deaths related to COVID-19 compared with White people.” Yearby, R., Clark, B., & Figueroa, J. F. (2022). Structural racism in historical and modern US health care policy. Health Affairs, 41(2), 187–194. https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2021.01466 “For several decades, research has shown that while blacks (or African Americans) often have higher rates of psychological distress than whites, some studies also find that whites have elevated levels of depressive and anxiety symptoms compared to blacks” (Williams, 2018). “A recent study of Latino adolescents found that both individual online discrimination (derogatory text, images, and symbols directly targeted at individuals because of their race and ethnicity) and vicarious online discrimination (derogatory incidents targeted to people of one’s own racial or ethnic group) were adversely related to adolescent mental health.” “A recent nationally representative, quasi-experimental study found that poli