September 2022    
         
         
 
     
  Wellness rift  
     
  To a stunning degree, Americans’ health and access to health care depend on where they live, the color of their skin, and other demographic factors. The COVID-19 pandemic threw these disparities into stark relief, motivating researchers, health care providers, and policy makers to intensify their efforts to bridge the divide.  
     
  Front lines  
     
 
 
 
     
  Image: Four stick figures—two standing on a stack of coins—reach for a red heart with white cross, a symbol for health care. (Pixabay/John Kevin)  
     
 
     
  “When Thomas Fisher, MD’01, started work on what would become The Emergency: A Year of Healing and Heartbreak in a Chicago ER (One World, 2022), the COVID-19 pandemic was still months away. Fisher, an emergency physician at UChicago Medicine, had intended to write a book about racial disparities in health and health care, neglect of Black communities, and the failures of the American health care system—never imagining that a once-in-a-century crisis would so suddenly and painfully illustrate his point.”  
     
  The University of Chicago Magazine spoke with Fisher about his experiences in a South Side Chicago ER.  
     
 
 
  A deeper look into the divide  
     
 
     
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Compared to White patients, Black patients are more than twice as likely to have negative descriptors in their medical records.
 
     
     
     
 
     
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A “staggering” number of people couldn’t get health care during the pandemic, with some racial and ethnic groups facing even higher levels of disruption.
 
     
     
     
 
     
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Health inequities aren’t confined to Medicare, Medicaid, or uninsured populations—they also affect people covered by employer-sponsored insurance plans.
 
     
     
     
 
     
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UChicago and Rush University have established the Chicago Chronic Condition Equity Network to research health disparities for Black and Latino people in the Chicago region.
 
     
 
 
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