Wrong prescription, again

Last year, Gov. Cuomo’s budget office wisely reversed course on killing two inexpensive but vitally important state health programs. Diversity in Medicine is a three-decade-old $1.24 million initiative that helps minority medical students stay in med school and has graduated more than 500 practicing physicians in New York State. The Empire Clinical Research Program is a $3.4 million investment that underwrites twoyear studies on subjects such as curbing opioid addiction and improving outcomes among kidney transplant and bladder cancer patients.

Yet this year, the budget gnomes have developed amnesia and once again are proposing cuts to both programs — a 20% cut to Diversity in Medicine and zeroing out the clinical research. The combined cost of $4.6 million only comprises 0.0024% of the state’s $192.9 billion budget. The funding must be restored.

Even before the pandemic, when COVID’s disproportionate impact on nonwhite communities sharply highlighted already existing racial disparities in health care access and treatment, research demonstrated that having more racially diverse doctors improves patients’ health outcomes. When patients see a doctor who shares their race or ethnicity, they’re likelier to adhere to prescribed medications and trust their doctor’s advice. A 2018 study found increasing numbers of Black doctors could reduce rates of Black men dying from cardiovascular disease by 19%.

Meanwhile, cutting the $3.4 million for clinical research studies is part of a disturbing trend in declining state support for public health infrastructure and research, at a time when the value of those public health investments, which help pay for contingencies like, ahem, preventing the spread of wildly contagious viruses or implementing mass vaccination campaigns, have never been clearer.

Even when the state budget outlook looked apocalyptically bad last spring and summer, it would have been difficult to justify cutting funding for expanded diversity and public health research. But now, with state tax revenues coming in higher than expected, and New York set to receive billions from President Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill, there’s simply no excuse.