I had an epiphany today regarding the most concise way to articulate my longstanding position on disparities - be they in health care or in any other sector of society. I may have only written one post on this topic previously...you can find it here. Turns out I wrote it exactly 1 year and 1 day ago.
In his research lecture, one of our faculty members defined disparity in the following way: "A disparity is a mismatch between need and care associated with membership in one socially identifiable and disadvantaged group compared with their non-disadvantaged counterpart. This may include, but is not limited to race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, culture, rurality and disability."
My qualm has always been with race. I have no problem looking at disparity based on socioeconomic status, or gender or a whole host of other things. These represent real differences and it's fine that they continue to be real differences. We don't need everyone to have the same amount of money, have the same age and to be the same gender. As regards to race, I seem to remember a time when the ideal society was conceptualized as "color-blind" - one where race was not a significant difference and thus peoples of different races would not even be recognizable as socially identifiable groups. What happened to that? I mean, maybe we're not there yet, but isn't this still the end goal? I believe that we reach this goal not by looking at every place where there exists a disparity and correcting it, but rather by ignoring such places as there exist disparity. Paying attention to racial differences only reinforces that they are real and important - which, I think most of us agree, they are not.
We have to work hard enough to overcome our differences as it is. Why place greater emphasis on them than they merit? Whatever happened to the goal of having a color-blind society?
