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Racial discrimination has penetrated into the American health care system. This is an inevitable problem that the United States desperately avoided. The COVID-19 pandemic has attracted attention. A study in May 2020 estimated that in the United States, blacks are 3.57 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than whites. Similarly, the risk of death among the Latino population is almost twice that of the white population.
As early as 2015, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has found many examples of health inequality caused by racism, including: life expectancy is significantly lower than that of whites, high prevalence of hypertension, and low influenza vaccination rate , Racism causes black stress, anxiety and depression. This is especially true for Asian Americans and Latino groups.
It seems that racism in the American medical profession is inevitable in all aspects of birth, old age, sickness and death. At the end of last year, the medical experience of an African-American female doctor Susan Moore sparked a debate about medical racial discrimination. Susan Moore was hospitalized after contracting the new crown virus, but she reported that she was discriminated against by white doctors and nurses during the hospitalization. The doctor believed that her physical condition was OK, ignored the symptoms Moore described, and forced her to leave the hospital. . Moore angrily recorded a video and posted it on his social account. She said, "If I were white, I wouldn't have experienced this." Moore was forced to leave the hospital on December 7, but she still felt tired and breathing heavily and was admitted to another hospital 12 hours later. At that time, she had a high fever of 39.4 degrees Celsius, her blood pressure dropped to 80/60, and her heartbeat was 132 beats per minute. On December 10, the doctor intubated her to connect to the ventilator. After that, Moore gradually fell into a coma. On the 20th, her heart stopped beating.
American mainstream media have reported Moore's story one after another, and her misfortune has aroused public outrage. Many netizens left messages accusing white doctors of the “racist practices” of the hospital. Some people also reported that they or their loved ones were discriminated against because of their skin color when they were hospitalized.
However, often when racial issues are exposed to the public, there is always a voice to guide public opinion: accusing people of color of using their minority identity to make excessive demands on doctors is playing the "race card." It is this kind of infinite cycle of "incident-avoidance-obliteration" that the problem of medical discrimination in the United States has existed for many years and seems to continue to exist. People of color in the United States are struggling with life and death, and they don't know when they will receive the respect and treatment they deserve in the country where they have worked and worked for them.