Elders receive inferior care

Study shows elderly Hispanic patients recieve slightly lower quality care in three crucial areas

Elderly Hispanics throughout the country tend to get inferior care, according to a Harvard School of Public Health study. The study showed that Medicare data from 2004 reveals that hospitals with high percentages of Hispanic patients tend to have slightly lower quality indicators in three crucial areas: heart attacks, congestive heart failure and pneumonia.

However, researchers acknowledged that the findings may not apply to Miami-Dade County, where 60 percent of the population is Hispanic and Hispanic patients make up the majority of the patients in the region’s hospitals. More than half of Hispanics get treated at 5 percent of the nation’s hospitals, the study found. The most recent census data, from 2006, indicates nearly 15 percent of the nation is Hispanic.

The findings indicate that in most areas of the country, Hispanics tend to be treated at hospitals that have a much higher percentage of patients on Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance for the poor that tends to pay much less for care than does private insurance or Medicare, the program for the elderly and disabled. Among other things, that means staffing levels are stressed, and each nurse needs to handle more patients. Most experts advocate better funding for Medicaid as one way to handle the disparity problem.