The Kaiser Family Foundation Reports:

As black Americans disproportionately suffer from conditions like high blood pressure and diabetes, and roughly 20% lack health insurance, some blacks are looking to the new health care law to reduce many of the health disparities that they face, NPR reports.

“One of the things I've seen as part of the health disparities,” said Donna Thompson, CEO of the Access Network, “is that for many people, they think, ‘If my grandmother died from the results of diabetes, that's probably going to be my legacy also.’ So, there's a huge opportunity with the health care bill” to persuade people to actually get treatment.”
With the health care overhaul expected to insure 32 million currently uninsured individuals, allowing for an opportunity to address chronic disease and focus on preventive care, many, including Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL) who recently held a forum to explain benefits of the bill, view the health care overhaul as a civil rights victory. “I was there in spirit to witness a president who with the stroke of his pen freed more people from 'health carelessness' than Abraham Lincoln freed from slavery,” Jackson said.

Not all believe, however, that the legislation has the ability to eliminate racial disparities. Claudia Fegan, a doctor at the Woodlawn Health Center, a public clinic in Chicago, believes that because millions of individuals will remain uninsured with the new health care law, the system won’t be fair. “There'll be people who have private insurance, there'll be people who have the public program, and there'll be people who are uninsured…As long as we have that multitiered system, we will perpetuate the disparities which people of color suffer more than anyone else” (Corley, 4/22).

To read the full NPR story click here.