Hospitals marked by low quality and high costs have double the proportion of elderly black patients as do high-quality, low-cost hospitals, according to a new study in the October issue of Health Affairs. Similar disparities were found for elderly Hispanic and Medicaid patients. The Commonwealth Fund–supported researchers, led by Harvard's Ashish K. Jha, M.D., report that the lower-performing hospitals are typically small public or for-profit institutions in the South, while the higher-performing facilities are typically nonprofit institutions in the Northeast.
