Experts dispute health care claims in the U.S report to U.N. Human Rights Council

“There’s probably a genetic component to almost all cancers or a combination of environmental and genetic components and then treatment issues and access to health care really impact the overall prognosis of survival,” she said, noting as an example that younger African American women succumb to breast cancer at higher rates than whites and that even in army studies, where everyone has equal access to care, those discrepancies remained.

Despite the questions surrounding claims that these statistics are a cause of discrimination and poor access, there are still many who continue to believe that the new Affordable Care Act is a net negative for the country’s health care system — implying that even if these ratios are a result of the current health care system, this new law will not help.

For example, Thomas Miller, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), told TheDC that the Affordable Care Law will not increase access and likely will make the situation even worse. “It will provide money to well connected political organizations who get ahead of the line and for some particular classes of beneficiaries they will re-juggle the distribution,” he said, “but in terms of improving the supply and quality of health care and making it truly more affordable when you account for all the costs? No, charitably you could call it a side step or a diversion but more likely it is a step back.”

Michael F. Cannon, the Cato Institute’s director of health policy studies, echoed the sentiment, saying that while a few will be better off, the majority will suffer. “The problem is that it will raise taxes so much, soak up so many resources and put it into unproductive uses in our health care sector and halt innovation that would otherwise make health care better and more affordable that more people are going to suffer than would benefit from this law,” he said.

Coming at the issue from a different perspective, Patricia Lane, neuroscience coordinator for Bon Secours St. Francis Medical Center in Richmond, Virginia, is hopeful that, as the report claims, the law will close the disparity gap. “That’s going to open more opportunities for us to have different venues and be able to have an equal playing field and access to care,” she said, but noted that genetics will remain a factor. “Until we can truly compare how certain medications work for us, how certain treatments work for us based on genetics then we really will not have those disparities go away.”

Dr. Robert Moffit, senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, took issue with that contention, saying that putting health care in the hands of the government will only exacerbate health problems in the country.

“The expansion of public programs has nothing to say about one’s access to actual care,” he said.

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