Do Black Babies Have Better Survival Rates with Black Doctors Than White Doctors?

Apparently not

Photo by Igordoon Primus on Unsplash

According to a famous study, Black newborns have higher survival rates when they’re attended by Black doctors than White doctors. A re-analysis of the data, however, shows that the effect disappears when you account for the fact that Black doctors more often see normal weight Black newborns, whereas White doctors more often see low birth weight Black newborns - newborns that have much poorer odds of survival.

(A) Fraction of newborns with Black physicians at each point of the birth weight distribution, by race of newborn. (B) Fraction of newborns with very low birth weight (under 1,500 g), by race of newborn and race of physician. Overall, 1.13 percent of White newborns and 2.96 percent of Black newborns have a very low birth weight. From Borjas and VerBruggen (2024).

The re-analysis was reported in a new paper by George Borjas and Robert VerBruggen, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Here’s the paper’s significance statement:

An influential study suggests that Black newborns experience much lower mortality when attended by Black physicians after birth. Using the same data, we replicate those findings and estimate alternative models that include controls for very low birth weights, a key determinant of neonatal mortality not included in the original analysis. The estimated racial concordance effect is substantially weakened, and often becomes statistically insignificant, after controlling for the impact of very low birth weights on mortality. Our results raise questions about the role played by physician–patient racial matching in determining Black neonatal mortality and suggest that the key to narrowing the Black–White gap may continue to lie in reducing the incidence of such low birth weights among Black newborns.

The paper is open access, so you can read the whole thing here.

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