Serena Williams’ story highlights disparities in American health care system

A mother has just given birth to a baby. She recognizes the signs of a blood clot. She tells her doctors and nurses, only for them to brush her concerns aside. When she finally does get the tests and medications she needed, they find she did have a blood clot and could have died if she had not advocated for herself.

This isn’t a story from some faraway country where it’s hard to come by sophisticated medical care. This story happened — in Florida — to Serena Williams, who easily could have died if she did not have a history of blood clots to be able to recognize the signs.

As one of the wealthiest nations in the world, the U.S. should not have a problem with maternal death. Yet, it does. And race plays a substantial factor in outcomes. We don’t pay enough attention to women’s health, and this is even worse for women of color. This was just as evident this week as Student Government declined to pay for menstrual products in UF’s bathrooms, because it would only benefit the female portion of the student body.

Reading about how common maternal death is in the U.S., I’d always assumed that it was an issue of money. I assumed factors like not having access to health insurance must make it difficult to make it to all the appropriate check-in appointments for a baby. But Serena Williams’ case shows that money doesn’t have to be the main factor.

Some might argue what happened to Williams may have nothing to do with race either — it was simply the medical staff trying to stop a new mother from overreacting — but statistics suggest otherwise. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, black women had 44 deaths per 100,0000 live births from 2011 to 2013. This is more than three times the maternal deaths for white women (13 per 100,000 live births) or women of other races (14 per 100,000 live births).

According to the World Health Organization, as cited by NPR, black expectant and new mothers in the U.S. die at rates comparable to Mexico and Uzbekistan. This should be embarrassing for a country that prides itself on medical innovation. Over the past several months, NPR and ProPublica have launched an investigation into maternal death in the U.S. Maternal death may be but a symptom of a larger issue — there is not enough focus on racial disparities in health care as a whole. Most people can agree that within the doors of a hospital, everyone should be treated the same, and preserving a person’s life should be put above all else, but this is not being put into practice.

According to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, people of color had less access and utilization of care and scored worse on measures of health. Despite gains made under the Affordable Care Act, people of color were still less likely to be insured.

When a woman as wealthy and powerful as Serena Williams still has to fight for her life after giving birth, it’s clear that we have a problem. A problem that may go even deeper than health care itself. A researcher at the University of Michigan, Arline Geronimus, coined the term “weathering,” to describe health erosion due to stress, according to NPR. The bottom line is the U.S. should not have such huge disparities in health outcomes. It’s clear that race can be a matter of life or death, even within hospitals. This is something we cannot let continue.

Nicole Dan is a UF political science and journalism senior. Her column appears on Mondays.