Racial Health Disparities, COVID-19, and a Way Forward for US Health Systems

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic highlights long-standing inequities in health along racial/ethnic lines in the United States. Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous people have been disproportionately affected during the pandemic. For example, the age-adjusted mortality rate among Black people with COVID-19 is 3.4 times as high as that of White people.¹

Structural racism shapes social forces, institutions, and ideologies that generate and reinforce racial inequities across different aspects of life. In this perspective, we discuss how, in the COVID-19 context, structural racism shapes access to and quality of care, as well as socioeconomic and health status. We offer guidance to health systems and healthcare providers on addressing health inequities.

Disparities in access to and quality of care contribute to racial health disparities. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, guidelines for COVID-19 testing were restrictive, only investigating those who had symptoms and had recently traveled to Wuhan, China, or had contact with someone who may have had the virus.² News reports show disparities in access to testing, with testing sites favoring wealthier, Whiter communities, a feature of racial residential segregation.³ Residential segregation has also contributed to a concentration of closures among urban public hospitals, affecting access to care.⁴ In New York City (NYC) and Boston, early hotspots of the pandemic, Black and Hispanic patients and underinsured/uninsured patients were significantly less likely to access care from academic medical centers (AMCs) compared with White, privately insured patients.⁵ AMCs boast greater resources, and inequalities produced by this segregated system of care are often exacerbated by governmental allocation of resources. For instance, NYC’s public hospitals care for the city’s low-income residents (who are disproportionately insured by Medicaid), yet received far less federal aid from the Provider Relief Fund COVID-19 High Impact Payments, which favored larger, private hospitals in Manhattan. These public hospitals, however, face looming Medicaid cuts.⁶ Similarly, the federal government delayed the release of funds to health centers located on Native American reservations, adversely affecting the Indian Health Service’s preparedness to face the pandemic.⁷ In tandem with the effects of residential segregation, these data highlight the tiered nature of the US healthcare system, a structure that significantly impacts the quality of care patients receive along racial and socioeconomic lines. Furthermore, studies have documented racial disparities in the provision of advanced therapies: in the case of predicting algorithms that identify patients with complex illnesses, reliance on cost (thus, previous utilization data) rather than actual illness means that only 17.5% of Black patients receive additional help.⁸