Early on in the debate over privatizing Social Security, the Bush gang came up with a creative talking point: the system is unfair to African Americans. As Bush put it, “African-American males die sooner than other males do, which means the system is inherently unfair to a certain group of people.”
Now, the entire argument is painfully ridiculous, and pretty offensive at that, but it did bring up a rather interesting point. Taken at face value, Bush claims to be concerned about a system that treats minorities unfairly.
Cynics may suggest the president was insincere, but let’s take him at his word. After all, if Bush is committed to spending whatever it takes to revamp an unfair system, have I got a system for him.
Black Americans still get far fewer operations, tests, medications and other life-saving treatments than whites, despite years of efforts to erase racial disparities in health care and help African Americans live equally long and healthy lives, according to three major studies being published today.
Blacks’ health care has started to catch up to whites’ in some ways, but blacks remain much less likely to undergo heart bypasses, appendectomies and other common procedures. They receive fewer mammograms and basic tests and drugs for heart disease and diabetes, and they have fallen even further behind whites in controlling those two major killers, according to the first attempts to measure the last decade’s efforts to improve equality of care.
Together, the research paints a discouraging picture of the nation’s progress in closing the gap for one of the fundamental factors that affect well-being — health care — during a period when blacks have made progress in areas such as income and education.
“We have known for 20 years that we have a problem in our health care system: that blacks and whites do not receive equal care. We had hoped all the attention paid to this topic would result in some improvement. What we found is we have not made much progress,” said Ashish K. Jha of the Harvard School of Public Health, who led one of the studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine. “This should be a call to action to make the changes needed to make sure people get equal care.”
Indeed, it should. Earlier this year, when the subject was Social Security’s alleged mistreatment of African Americans, Bush said, “I came to Washington to be more than just a place holder. I came to Washington to analyze a problem, to deal with a problem, and to leave a legacy behind of fixing the problem.” If that meant spending trillions of dollars and adding vast sums to the national debt, Bush suggested, so be it.
Well, Mr. President, here’s your chance to fix a system with a real racial imbalance. Better yet, it’ll cost a fraction of Social Security privatization. Care to leave a legacy behind of fixing the problem?