The following post is from Stephen Texeira.

Warning! This article contains a fair amount of cynicism. It may not be suitable for less mature audiences.

Apparently it costs this country’s health system a lot of money to have non-white people in it. That may not have been the primary point of the recent study Urban Institute, but that is essentially what they are saying:

We estimate that in 2009, disparities among African Americans, Hispanics, and non-Hispanic whites will cost the health care system $23.9 billion dollars. Medicare alone will spend an extra $15.6 billion while private insurers will incur $5.1 billion in additional costs due to elevated rates of chronic illness among African Americans and Hispanics. Over the 10-year period from 2009 through 2018, we estimate that the total cost of these disparities is approximately $337 billion, including $220 billion for Medicare.

If my understanding about the motivation for this study is correct, they are trying to produce an economic argument for doing something about the health disparities in this country. And they are very real disparities. African Americans and Latinos have higher rates of diabetes, stroke, renal disease and hypertension than whites. According to some information I found on the University of Cincinnati’s NetWellness website,

• 251 per 100,000 African American males suffer from Prostate Cancer as compared to 167 per 100,000 white men.
• 108 per 100,000 African American men suffer from lung/bronchus cancer as compared to 72 white men.
• 68 per 100,000 African American men suffer from colon/rectal cancer as compared to 58 per 100,000 white men.

There are similar statistics for African American women, Latinos and Asians. Now I’m not an expert on this kind of thing, but I believe that this probably translates into shorter life spans. In fact a report from the Census Bureau showed that the primary cause of the disparities in lifespan between racial and geographic groups is early death from chronic disease and injuries.

Now I know that we all like money. And I know that it is often used as a great motivator for action. “Hey this is costing us money, let’s change it.” But when did money become a great motivator for change than death? I don’t know for sure, but I’d guess that these same fine people who produced the studies cited above have probably produced similar studies for years decrying the loss of life and decreased quality of life because of health disparities. And they probably did so in vain. Then one day some clever graduate public health graduate student decided that she might get more attention for the problems if she looked at them from an economic perspective.

I know, I’m being a bit cynical, but I warned you about that at the beginning of this article didn’t I? The Urban Institute has done a fine thing with this study, and I’m certain that there are people out there who are shocked by the price tag of these health disparities; shocked enough, perhaps, to do something about it. I just wish that those same people would be as motivated by black men dying of prostate cancer or Latino’s dying as a result of diabetes.