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	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

To the Editor: The article by Dr Fiscella and colleagues¹ lists much of the accumulated evidence for socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic disparities in health care quality. However, the documentation marshaled by these authors suggests that important racial and ethnic health care disparities are uniformly represented by undertreatment and lack of access to medical services by minority groups.

We believe that important disparities may also be represented by easy access to, and increased use of, some medical services by minorities. For instance, African American women obtain elective abortions at 2.7 times the rate of white women in the United States, a differential that has been increasing since 1989,² despite a decrease in the general availability of this medical service.³

Matthews et al⁴ looked at how abortion rates correlated with a number of variables, by state. Although they found no correlation with economic factors, they did find a positive correlation with the . . . [Full Text of this Article]

RELATED ARTICLE

Inequality in Quality: Addressing Socioeconomic, Racial, and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care
Kevin Fiscella, Peter Franks, Marthe R. Gold, and Carolyn M. Clancy
JAMA. 2000;283(19):2579-2584.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT  

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