{
  "id": "1999-march-treatment-disparity",
  "slug": "1999-march-treatment-disparity",
  "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1999-march-treatment-disparity.html",
  "year": 1999,
  "month": "March",
  "monthNum": 3,
  "headline": "Treatment disparity",
  "kicker": "CARE AND COLOR",
  "author_name": "Adam Pitluk",
  "author_title": "",
  "affiliation": "Newsday",
  "summary": "A Newsday investigation reveals significant racial disparities in healthcare outcomes between Black and white patients in the New York region, with Black patients receiving less effective treatments for conditions like diabetes, heart disease, and kidney failure.",
  "keywords": [
    "healthcare",
    "disparities",
    "amputation"
  ],
  "topics": [
    "Health & Environment",
    "Investigative Methods",
    "Demographics & Census"
  ],
  "technologies": [],
  "full_text": "School safety officer Dedri Brown, an African-American diabetic, lost a leg to amputation. Yet it might have been saved if she had been aware of available treatments. Amputation is just one of several fates suffered more frequently by black diabetics than white diabetics, a Newsday investigation found.\n\nGerald Adams is another example of insufficient health care for Blacks in New York: He has been waiting for a kidney transplant for five years — almost twice as long as the average white patient.\n\nFor the past year, reporters from Newsday examined the health care provided to people in their region. The newspaper conducted a behavioral-risk study of more than 2,000 residents of Long Island and Queens to parallel surveys done at the federal level. At the helm of the investigation was Newsday data specialist and reporter Ford Fessenden, now with The New York Times.\n\nFessenden's story started as an offshoot of a 1996 report card on all of the hospitals in the area. Newsday Associate Managing Editor Rich Galant wanted to know what the numbers had to say about the health issues facing readers. He and projects editor Bob Tiernan sent Fessenden to find out.\n\n\"We found that the health of people in our region was good virtually on everything except heart disease,\" Fessenden said, \"and nobody had ever really told people they had some of the highest heart attack rates in the country.\"\n\nTransformed investigation\n\nIt also quickly became clear that health care varied widely among different populations in Queens and Long Island. The study manifested into an issue of who receives better and more effective health care, whites or blacks. Here is what Newsday found:\n\n• Whites get more intensive treatment. They die of coronary heart disease at a lower rate than blacks but are more likely to undergo advanced heart procedures. Whites also have hip replacements at a rate twice as high as blacks, knee replacements at a rate 23 percent higher, and gall-bladder operations at a rate 53 percent higher. (All figures are adjusted for differences in age between the races.)\n\n• Blacks receive more radical surgery when less severe alternatives are an option. Newsday cited diabetes as an example: Blacks are more likely to lose feet or legs to amputation; whites are more likely to have surgery to restore blood flow and save their legs. Among 1,907 whites and 385 blacks from Nassau, Suffolk and Queens who had surgery for arteriosclerosis or diabetes-related circulatory problems in 1995, 61 percent of whites had surgery to restore blood flow, but only 43 percent of blacks had leg-saving surgery. Dedri Brown was not among them.\n\n• Black women are more likely to have the more invasive kind of hysterectomy treatment. Blacks with serious kidney problems wait longer for transplants and are less likely to receive one than whites. For every 1,000 blacks in the hospital with kidney failure, there were 8.2 transplants; for whites, 13.3 transplants.\n\nDelayed visits\n\nFessenden and his team analyzed some 3 million records of hospital admissions in Long Island and Queens covering a period of five years.\n\nAs part of the inquiry, Newsday, joined by The New York Times, sued the state — which had refused to release fields in health care databases identifying doctors and insurance companies — and won. Newsday then showed that the best hospitals and busiest doctors treated white patients almost exclusively. Newsday also commissioned a pollster and concluded that blacks are more likely to seek alternatives to traditional medicine and delay visiting a doctor.\n\n\"Even blacks with good insurance are sicker when they arrive at the doors of medical practitioners,\" he said. \"Black cancer sufferers are more likely to die of their disease — a strong indicator they aren't getting care early enough.\"\n\nTreatment disparities have been an ongoing problem in medicine, Fessenden said. The purpose of his coverage was to let the numbers tell the story and make patients and doctors alike aware of this dirty little secret. On Feb. 14, 1999, a local conference of health officials addressed the problem, a direct result of Fessenden and Newsday's findings.",
  "provenance": {
    "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6",
    "extracted_at": "2026-07-05",
    "verified": true
  },
  "similar": [
    {
      "slug": "1999-march-finding-the-unknown",
      "score": 0.816
    },
    {
      "slug": "1999-october-transplant-disparity",
      "score": 0.256
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    {
      "slug": "1999-september-healthcare-by-color",
      "score": 0.23
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    {
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      "score": 0.146
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    {
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  ],
  "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1999-march-treatment-disparity.html",
  "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1999-march-treatment-disparity.json"
}