Health care reform will be a lot of things to this country beyond providing quality, affordable health care for everyone. It can be seen as economic stimulus to get our country moving again. If we increase taxes on those making more than a quarter of a million dollars per year to pay for it, as the House has proposed, we can reform the tax code to be more progressive as we're passing health reform. Health care reform can be all these things.

And it can also fight racism.

Today, Health Care for America Now released a report today [pdf] on the inequities evident in our health care system, complete with state by state data. Here are the irrefutable facts:

As a result people of color are trapped in a vicious cycle of disease, poor quality of care and insufficient access to non-emergency and  preventive services. This comes at a terribly high cost. Were racial disparities absent from our health care, the deaths of more than 880,000 African Americans would have been averted from 1991 to 2000, according to a recent analysis of mortality data. The implications are profound when one considers the demographic trends at work today. The Census Bureau projects that 62 percent of the U.S. population will consist of people of color by 2050,7 when the U.S. population is expected to reach 439 million, up from 302 million today.

Compared to non-Latino whites, African Americans and Latinos are more likely to go without health care because they can’t afford it. A larger share of African Americans and Latinos lack a usual place of health care, and they are less than half as likely as whites to have a regular doctor. Low-income residents and people of color always score lower in measures of preventive health, such as frequency of cancer screenings and well-visit checkups. Inequities in health are accompanied by disparities in health insurance coverage. People of color have the highest rates of uninsurance.

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The effects are devastating to a multicultural society. They include shorter life expectancy, higher infant mortality rates, lower quality care, greater risk of diabetes, higher likelihood of death from cancer, less access to life-extending high-tech procedures, and increased risk of receiving undesirable treatments, such as limb amputations.

To put it another way, people of color die because our health care system doesn't serve them nearly as well as those of us who are white.

Why does this happen? There are two few doctors to treat patients in a culturally sensitive manner, meaning patients either don't get the care they need or refuse to go to doctors that can't speak their language or make them uncomfortable. There are fewer hospitals and doctors in areas high in minority populations. And the clinics that are in minority areas tend to be underfunded and staffed.

We can fix these things with health reform that does away with ethnic disparities. That means incentivizing payments to reward and encourage doctors who speak other languages and who have special training in cultural competence. That means incentivizing payment structures so hospitals and clinics have reason to set up shop in minority areas. And it means focusing fixing environmental obstacles to health like access to nutritious food, which is often severely lacking in minority neighborhoods.

All of these things can and should be addressed in health reform legislation, and if we address these things, health reform can fight the racism inherent in our current health care system.