Inequality drastically increased since COVID and crushes economic growth.

From the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, a disturbing pattern was clear: the new disease was hitting some groups of Americans much harder than others. It wasn’t just people 65 and older who were more susceptible. Black and Hispanic people, and other racial and ethnic groups had significantly higher rates of severe illness, hospitalization, and death than white Americans.

Statistics compiled by the COVID Tracking Project, for example, showed that Black people were dying at 1.7 times the rate of white people, and a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that Latinx, Hispanic, and American Indian or Alaska native people were nearly twice as likely as non-Hispanic white people to seek emergency room care for the disease.

Why the disparity? Commonly cited reasons include the fact that Black and Hispanic people are overrepresented in “essential” jobs, meaning they did not have the option of working remotely, which increased their exposure to the virus. Those in this group were also reported to suffer disproportionately from diabetes, asthma, and obesity, putting them at a higher risk for severe cases of COVID-19. Topping it off, racial and ethnic groups have historically had less access to quality care because of poor or non-existent medical insurance or obstacles in navigating the dauntingly complex healthcare system.

“A disproportionate number of minority [groups] have lost employer-based insurance during COVID,” said Falguni Sen, PhD, professor of strategy and statistics at the Gabelli School and director of Fordham’s Global Healthcare Innovation Management Center. “And a lack of community health centers resulted in later diagnosis of COVID on average, allowing it to become severe before treatment could be administered. People without insurance have also been found to use the emergency room as their primary care.”

Public health experts call these factors social determinants of health, and have long identified them as key reasons for the inequitable delivery of healthcare in America, but the pandemic shone an important light on this problem.

An X-ray on a Country and its Values

“COVID-19 has absolutely been an X-ray on America and our values,” said Errol Pierre, BS, ’05, senior vice president of state programs at Healthfirst, Inc., New York’s largest nonprofit insurer. (Pierre’s 18-year career also includes a decade with New York’s largest for-profit insurer, Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield.) “The difference in statistics was just shocking. You can never unsee COVID. I think it also gave people the language to talk about this problem. You can say ‘health equity,’ and people [now] know what that means.”

The pandemic may have given Americans a better sense of the nation’s health disparities, but probably not of their historic economic consequences. A 2018 report by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and Altarum, a non-profit healthcare research group, found that disparities result in approximately $93 billion in excess medical care costs and $42 billion in lost productivity annually, not including the economic losses due to premature deaths.

Given those numbers, reducing health disparities would not only lead to less human suffering, but would also reduce inefficiency in a system that accounts for nearly a fifth of America’s gross domestic product, said Pierre.