ABSTRACT
Congressional Democrats were less convinced that the report's optimism and emphasis on personal health responsibility as a major contributor to health disparities were appropriate. Modern medicine has made great strides in improving health care and in finding cures for a range of diseases. But for many chronic and infectious diseases, and particularly those that disproportionately strike some racial and ethnic minorities, the best that medicine can offer is to manage disease and reduce disabling symptoms. Policies and practices of health systems-such as the ways in which systems are organized and financed, and the availability of services-may exert different effects on patient care, particularly for racial and ethnic minorities. Language barriers, for example, pose a problem for many patients where health systems lack the resources, knowledge, or institutional priority to provide interpretation and translation services. Changes in the financing and delivery of health care services may also pose greater barriers to care for racial and ethnic minorities.
