ASSIGNMENT 2

Assignment 2

Assignment 2

Introduction

The notion that substantial improvements in the health indicators of U.S. racial and ethnic minority populations have been achieved over the past fifty years is relatively uncontroversial. By way of example, David Mechanic recently reported in Health Affairs(Mar/Apr 02) that infant mortality among African Americans fell from 43.9 deaths per thousand in 1950 to 13.8 in 1998. However, as Mechanic also noted, the troubling fact that infant mortality among African Americans remained 130 percent higher than that among whites as recently as 1998 dramatically illustrates that despite improvements in absolute numbers, the issue of health disparities is ...