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Racial Disparities in Access to Long-Term Care: The Illusive Pursuit of Equity
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Racial Disparities in Access to Long-Term Care: The Illusive Pursuit of Equity

David Barton Smith, Zhanlian Feng, Mary L. Fennell, Jacqueline Zinn and Vincent Mor
Journal of health politics, policy and law, v 33(5), pp 861-881
Oct 2008
PMID: 18818425

Abstract

Medicine and Health Political Science Politics Public Health and Health Policy Public Policy
While nursing homes were insulated from civil-rights enforcement at the time of the implementation of the Medicare program and lagged behind other parts of the health sector in providing comparable access to minorities, they are the only providers for which current reporting requirements make it possible to fully assess racial disparities in use and quality of care. We find that African Americans' use of nursing homes in 2000 in the United States was 14 percent higher than Caucasians' use. The largest relative African American use of nursing homes in 2000 took place in the South and West. Average nursing-home case-mix acuity for African Americans and Caucasians were essentially identical, suggesting that shifts in payment incentives have eliminated the selective admission of easy-care private-pay (predominantly Caucasian) patients and helped fuel the growth of private pay home care and assisted living for this segment of the population. While these shifts in incentives helped increase the use of nursing homes by African Americans, a high degree of segregation and disparity in the quality of the nursing homes used by African Americans persists. Parity in use is an illusive benchmark for measuring progress in assuring equity in treatment.

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Collaboration types
Domestic collaboration
Web of Science research areas
Health Care Sciences & Services
Health Policy & Services
Medicine, Legal
Social Issues
Social Sciences, Biomedical
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