Healthcare Bias

Black and Hispanic New Yorkers continue to die of COVID-19 twice as often as white New Yorkers

Healthcare bias based on race has limited the quality of treatment non-white patients receive, with half of white medical trainees of nurses believing that black skin is thicker than white, and that black people have less sensitive nerve endings than white people, leading them to be under-treated for pain. Additionally, many doctors perceive Black people’s requests for help to be ‘drug-seeking’ behaviour, or that they are simply ‘overly-passionate’ and ‘hysterical.’

Black and Hispanic Americans are less likely to be able to afford health insurance. 55.5% of African Americans had private health insurance, compared to 75.4% of white Americans. Overall, Black Americans have higher rates of unemployment and under-representation in good-paying jobs that include health insurance as part of the benefit package. People of colour are also often at greater risk from the virus as they are more likely to live in crowded conditions, to work in service jobs that put them in close proximity to others, to have to go to work because they can’t afford to miss it, to take public transportation, and to lack access to protective gear at work. Further, a lot of US COVID hotlines only offer services in English, making it hard for minorities to access reliable health information.

Universal healthcare could be a solution, but it needs to be able to reach all citizens for it to truly combat medical inequality. In Australia, despite universal healthcare, rural and indigenous communities aren’t given the same level of medical accessibility.

So how can we go about solving this? There needs to be better medical diversity training for healthcare, so sign the petition on our website that enables that. We need redistricting congressional counties so that gerrymandering doesn’t compromise fair elections and politicians can become more representative of minority views. But on an individual level, we can be aware of our medical rights. Australia has posters in every room of hospitals and doctors rooms outlining your medical rights. The US can certainly adopt these measures to ensure everyone is aware of their healthcare rights.