Dr. Sanjay Gupta hosted an investigative news segment on racial discrimination that results from separate and unequal care provided by private hospitals in New York City. The story focused on a civil rights complaint filed with the Office of the Attorney General of New York State in June 2008 by New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI) on behalf of Bronx Health REACH, a coalition of over 40 community and faith-based organizations led by the Institute for Family Health. In multiple visits to The 2008 complaint was filed against "We've found pervasive segregation of care, based on the insurance status of people in the community. As blacks and Latinos are two to three times more likely to be uninsured or publicly insured, there is a close link between race, ethnicity and insurance status. This results in the systematic channeling of whites and minorities into different systems of care and these systems are not of equal quality or equally accessible," said Neil Calman, M.D., president of the Institute for Family Health, and principal investigator for Bronx Health REACH. "We have called this medical apartheid because it separates people by race and has the same deadly effect as apartheid in other settings.” “The complaint documents specific findings of system-wide policies and practices contributing to the segregation of care,” remarked Nisha Agarwal, Director of the Health Justice Program at For more ABOUT Bronx Health REACH, established in 1999, includes 40 community and faith-based organizations dedicated to eliminating racial and ethnic health disparities in health outcomes. In addition to its advocacy efforts, the group sponsors community health promotion and disease prevention programs, with support from the Centers for Disease Control and the NYS Department of Health. REACH is a project of the Institute for Family Health, a nonprofit organization that operates health centers and trains health professionals to work in urban, medically underserved communities in New York State. ABOUT New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI) is a nonprofit civil rights law firm that strives for social justice in Meghan Sherman
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