None of Dr. David Ansell’s patients who needed a transplant ever got one in his 27 years at two of Chicago’s safety-net hospitals, yet the patients from the trauma units there, many of them black, he says, provided the organs for the procedures at the wealthier hospitals. Why? Ansell says the poorer hospitals had no transplant specialists on staff and, even if a referral were to be made, either the specialist didn’t accept that type insurance or the patient was uninsured. It’s these and other inequities that’s leading to wide disparities in the health between white and brown people in the U.S., says Ansell, who speaks in Kalamazoo on June 6.

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