My cousin, who immigrated to the United States from Bangladesh three years ago, went to her first medical visit with my father, who served as her translator. She went to the only primary care clinic available in her community and was seen by a white physician. One of the doctor’s instructions to remove certain clothing for a proper physical exam created an uncomfortable situation. It is not proper in our culture for a female to remove any clothing in the presence of any male other than her husband. Clearly, the doctor was not aware of this cultural aspect. My father did not understand whether to leave the exam room for my cousin to have her physical exam completed or to stay in the room to continue translating as my cousin could not speak English. Perhaps, if the doctor was of a cultural background similar to ours, she would have proposed an appropriate solution to such a problem. In general, people of similar backgrounds are more culturally competent with one another. A person feels more comfortable in the presence of someone to whom they can relate.

Minority (Asian American, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander, American Indian, and Alaska Native) and non-English speaking populations in the United States have grown significantly during the past two decades, and minorities may be a majority by 2050. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that approximately 36.3 percent of the population currently belongs to a racial and ethnic minority group based on the 2010 U.S. Census. Given that minorities are at disproportionate risk of being uninsured and having low incomes, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act coverage expansions bring attention to the urgent need for a supply of physicians to care for these newly insured populations.

According to a cross-sectional analysis of 7070 adults in the 2010 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, nonwhite physicians cared for 53.5% of minority and 70.4% of non-English-speaking patients.¹ In addition; patients from underserved populations were significantly more likely to see nonwhite physicians than white physicians. The lead author of this analysis is Lydonna Marrast, a researcher and physician at the Cambridge Health Alliance.

“Minority physicians to a large extent care for underserved patients.  And so one potential solution, one concrete solution, to this possible access issue that is individuals having insurance but not being able to find providers, is to increase the number of underrepresented minority physicians,” Marrast said. Studies of service commitment indicate that underrepresented minority (URM) physicians practice in an underserved community at a significantly higher rate than their nonminority counterparts.

Increasing URM representation in medicine comes with valuable benefits. It will improve our public health by increasing access to care for minority patients and produce a more diverse learning environment in medical schools, creating more open-minded and humanistic physicians. It will also produce a physician workforce that will be capable of providing more trustworthy and culturally competent care. However, President Obama’s extreme cuts to graduate medical education (GME), training required for medical students to practice as physicians, of over $11 billion over the next decade as proposed in his fiscal 2016 budget, will exacerbate our national crisis of minority physician shortage. The Association for American Medical Colleges projects a shortage of about 45,000 primary care physicians by 2020. That’s in five years. It takes at least 7 years to train a doctor. The time to act is right now.

This post was written by a student enrolled in the Capstone Seminar course in the undergraduate program in public policy at Hunter College. Any opinions expressed here are solely those of the student.