National Election Looming in Which

¶ … national election looming in which the stakes will likely be decided by the perceived merits of health care reform, the rancor and futility of the political contest is being offset by highly productive and thoughtful research within the medical field. A close reading and thorough review of two articles published by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJH), in response to concerns over the Obama Administration's controversial Affordable Care Act (ACA), demonstrates the benefits to be afforded by conscientious debate. Published in the RWJH's Health Policy Connection in December of 2011, the Issue Brief entitled How Will the Affordable Care Act Help Diversify the Health Care Workforce? examines the positive impacts which can be fostered "when a health care workforce reflects the racial, ethnic, economic and cultural diversity of the patients it serves" (Workforce, 2011). This contribution to the national discussion over health care reform offers a bold proposition, positing that government programs designed to increase the number of ethnic minorities working in the health care workforce will serve to vastly improve the delivery of health care services to ethnically diverse communities. A supplementary article entitled How Does the Affordable Care Act Address Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care? was published within the same venue and addresses the relative worth of ACA mandates requiring health care providers to gather data regarding a patient's race, ethnicity and language. In penning this piece, the RWJH asserts that several provisions of the ACA are designed specifically to reduce widespread disparities in the health of minorities and to improve the quality of health care they receive.

While one may be reticent regarding the explicit infusion of race and ethnicity in federal health care reform legislation, the sheer enormity of scientific data indicating a definitive link between race and health suggests that the ACA is justified in mandating oversight. As the author of the article on diversifying the health care workforce astutely observes, "relative to the U.S. population, African-Americans and Latinos are still significantly underrepresented within the ranks of physicians, nurses and dentists" while "less than 5% of physicians or dentists are African-American or Hispanic" (Workforce, 2011). In an era supposedly far removed from the institutional bigotry of prior decades, this inexplicable gap represents an unacceptable failing on the part of both public servants and private industry. I agree with the article's conclusion that the ACA's mandated expansion of federal programs providing health care to underserved communities "will create professional opportunities for doctors, nurses and other health care workers from underrepresented racial, ethnic and economic groups" (Workforce, 2011) because decades of workforce research and statistical evidence suggests that the market is unable or unwilling to do so of its own accord.