Minority populations are more vulnerable to low-value care

Black and Hispanic populations in the U.S. are more likely to receive unnecessary and potentially harmful healthcare services compared to whites, according to a new Health Affairs study. The report found that black and Hispanic Medicare patients received services of low-value at a higher rate than whites. “There is a very clear consensus in the literature that minority populations in the U.S. tend to receive lower amounts of effective care,” said William Schpero, lead author of the study and a doctoral candidate in the department of health policy and management at the Yale School of Public Health. Schpero and his co-authors analyzed Medicare claims data from 2006 to 2011 as well as 11 treatments identified as low-value by the Choosing Wisely initiative, which aims to reduce unnecessary