Secretary Shalala has appointed OCR director Tom Perez, along with the director of the Health Care Financing Administration's Center for Medicaid and State Operations, as co-chairs of a Departmental working group that is coordinating the Department's immediate and long term response to the Olmstead decision. In seeking to resolve the two dozen or so pending complaints raising Olmstead issues, OCR stands ready to provide technical assistance to bring all the stakeholders together to develop workable plans for eligible individuals to move to community settings. In Health Care Racial and ethnic disparities in health outcomes are well documented. There are many factors that contribute to these disparities, including economics, education, geography and genetics. Unfortunately, racial discrimination also plays a role.
Discrimination can infect the corporate board rooms, the classrooms and the courtrooms.
It also can affect who gets to the operating room. OCR's enforcement experience, coupled with compelling research documenting the prevalence of racial bias in physician decision-making, demonstrates that eliminating racial disparities in the provision of health care services is both a public health and civil rights challenge. Aggressive enforcement of civil rights laws must be an important component of our overall strategy to eliminate the racial disparities in health.