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Surgeon General: Health inequities have 'just been exacerbated during this pandemic'

Yahoo Finance senior reporter Anjalee Khemlani spoke with U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy about health care inequity and policy reform.

Video transcript

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Are there policies that you're considering or ways to craft messaging to help ensure that clinicians and you know, broadly the general public as well as health care companies, can really think about this in a constructive way move forward, keeping that at the forefront?

VIVEK MURTHY: Yeah. I'm really glad you brought up equity, Anjalee because this comes up a lot in our conversations internally. I'll tell you is that this is a key part of the metrics that we look at on a regular basis. I'll just give you a simple example with the vaccination campaign, we know that success for us is not just the number of people you vaccinate, it's how fairly and equitably we vaccinate the population.

Which is why even though it took a very long time and it took a lot of effort and a lot of engagement, and strategy, we were very gratified to see that now the proportion of eligible individuals in America who have been vaccinated is now roughly similar. When you look at Black populations, Latino populations, white populations. That is good news that is a sign of progress, but we're not done yet by any means, because if anything COVID-19 showed us that the deep inequities that predated COVID have just been exacerbated during this pandemic, economic inequities, educational inequities, and certainly health inequities.

So there's a lot that we have to do but you know, one of the things that you see even in the last six to nine months is the amount of funding that has gone toward inequity initiatives through the American Rescue Plan is really unprecedented. The focus and building into metrics you know, the kind of equity progress that we're making, whether it's initiatives in the Department of Health and Human Services or in other departments, is also really striking.

And finally, when you look at the health care profession itself and how we train doctors and nurses and other health care providers, we're having more and more conversations with those training institutions and members of the profession, major medical organizations, about how we can jointly pursue equity and make it part of how clinicians and public health leaders think about their charge. When I was going through medical school, the idea was you become a doctor, you treat the patient in front of you and you've done your job.

But now increasingly, the message that we want to send to health care providers across the country is that our collective job as a profession is not only to treat the patient in front of us but to also look out for the patient who's not in front of us, who doesn't have the means to get on a train and show up in our clinic, or who doesn't have the means to get out of work and come to a doctor's appointment. It's those people who are in the shadows that we've got to remember, we've got to fight for. And that's why equity remains at the forefront and center of our efforts on COVID and on health more broadly.