Racial Matching Among African-American and Hispanic Physicians and Patients

Abstract

It is widely known that minority doctors have more patients of their same race and ethnicity than would be predicted by random distribution, but most measures of racial matching do not control for physician specialty, practice setting, or location. When we control for these variables, differences by doctor's race are much smaller and, in many cases, not statistically significant, suggesting that simply increasing the supply of minority physicians may not be the best way to increase access for under-served populations. However, we do find some evidence of culture-specific human capital (in the form of language ability) for Hispanics.

Keywords: Racial matching, Patient choice, Doctor choice, Discrimination

JEL Classification: I11, C19, J29