by Askia Muhammad
White House Correspondent

WASHINGTON�There is a grave health-care crisis facing Blacks in America that is caused by a pernicious practice of "health care racial profiling" which results in at least 90,000 needless deaths each year, according to an exhaustive set of reports issued recently by the National Medical Association (NMA), the nation�s largest group of Black doctors.

"It�s estimated that more than 90,000 excess deaths�that are preventable�occur each year in Blacks," Dr. Rodney G. Hood, NMA president told The Final Call following a Capitol Hill press conference. "Simply by instituting preventive care measures we could prevent those folks from dying. That does not occur in the white community."

Retired Congressional Black Caucus Health Braintrust Chairman Louis Stokes (D-Ohio) supports the NMA findings. "The interesting dichotomy is, while American health generally has been improving�that is the research advances and medical discoveries have made America the most advanced medical community in the world, and overall we find the health of most Americans being improved�at the same time, we have these excess deaths which are now increasing rather than decreasing," Mr. Stokes said in an interview. "While American health has improved generally, it has not inured to the benefit of minorities. We still have these gaping health disparities as it relates to minorities."

Dr. Hood released a series of targeted, action-oriented recommendations from the NMA�s new Presidential Commission on Racial and Health Disparities, including: the creation of a Black health "think tank on racism and health disparities;" tax incentives for small businesses; increased funding for the NIH Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities; Medicaid and Medicare reform; recognition of racial bias as a contributing cause of health disparities; and the establishment of uniform standards for collecting race-based data on health care outcomes.

"The National Medical Association is concerned that historic and current health information points to a modern-day form of �health care racial profiling� that must be addressed if we are to ever achieve parity in health care," said Dr. Hood.

Recent studies have confirmed what Black physicians and health care givers have known for years: there are significant disparities in the quality of health care provided to non-whites in the United States. There are also disparities in training and professional advancement opportunities for equitable participation by non-white physicians in the system of managed health care.

The NMA reports are in response to a recent "Call to the Nation to Eliminate Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities," issued by the Office of the U.S. Surgeon General and the American Public Health Association. "We feel strongly that the goals outlined in the U.S. Surgeon General�s �Healthy People 2010� initiative will not be accomplished unless there is sustained special emphasis on achieving parity for African Americans," said Dr. Hood.

This widening health care gap has deep historical roots, according to one of the several meticulously researched reports released by the NMA. "Racism in medicine and health care has operated at institutional, intellectual, policy and personal levels, and is deeply ingrained into the fabric of the U.S. medical-social culture," according to the NMA Colloquium on African American Health report titled "The Slave Health Deficit."

The effects are "corrosive," writes Dr. Kirk A. Johnson in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The legacy is ingrained in the American culture: "a race and class-based dual-tier health care system, a resilient health deficit for Black Americans that dates from slavery; the willing acceptance of starkly different indicators of �normal� health status for Blacks and whites; and, perhaps most controversial of all, the medical profession�s relegation of physicians and nurses of color to an inferior caste."

The only way to appropriately address the disparate health among Blacks and whites in this country is to have an independent institution dedicated to health policy and research, according to Dr. Hood. "We don�t want to spend the next 100 years pointing fingers or actually debating whether institutional racism or racism in medicine exists. There�s multiple research that now points to the fact that it does," he said.

"Our issue is, �America: Get over it!� What we need to do is say: �It exists. What are the steps we need to take to resolve it?�" Those steps, he insists are "education and legislation."