The top U.S. trade groups representing hospitals, nurses and physicians are urging Senate leaders to earmark additional funds to help address disparities in COVID-19 care.
Chief executives with the American Hospital Association, American Medical Association and American Nurses Association underscored the pandemic’s outsized impact on people of color in a letter sent Friday. In particular, black people are dying at a rate almost two times higher (24%) than their share of the population (13%), and in four states, Latinos make up a greater share of confirmed COVID cases when compared to their proportion of the populace.
To remedy the situation, AHA, AMA and ANA leaders want financial help from the feds, including a 15% boost to SNAP and $100 million more toward the Administration for Community Living. The latter, they noted, could provide direct services such as home-delivered meals and support for seniors and individuals with disabilities.
“The healthcare interventions we provide must be supported by an immediate, comprehensive and data-driven federal response to save the lives of people of color,” CEOs Rick Pollack (AHA), James Madara (AMA) and Loressa Cole (ANA) wrote to Sens. Mitch McConnell and Charles Schumer on July 17.
Improving testing access, funding state and local health departments’ data collection around disparities, and tasking the CDC with conducting field studies on health inequities could also help, the CEOs added. They implored lawmakers to include additional funding in the next COVID relief package to help stem alarming trends among minority communities.
“Since initial news reports in March shone a light on the disproportionate impact of the virus on the racially marginalized and minoritized, the inequities in virus rates and deaths have not abated,” they wrote. “With the death toll now exceeding 136,000 nationally, we remain concerned that comprehensive national data on COVID-19 testing, infections and deaths by race and ethnicity is lacking...”
You can read the full four-page letter here.
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Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.