Is the health care system ready to serve an America that grows increasingly diverse by the year? In an opinion piece for Modern Healthcare, Commonwealth Fund President David Blumenthal, M.D., discusses his fear that the nation’s health professionals and health care institutions are “woefully ill-equipped.”

U.S. health care, Blumenthal writes, has a long way to go to address and overcome the racism and treatment bias that contributes to black women dying from pregnancy-related complications at up to four times the rate of white women, and from breast and uterine cancers at rates 41 percent and 98 percent higher.

“Public policy, demography and the march of technology are making ever more pressing the need for healthcare providers…to end racism where it originates, in the thoughts and attitudes of a country that has embraced racism, overtly and covertly, for most of its history.”