At the Health Affairs blog, Cato adjunct scholar Richard A. Epstein critiques the usual remedies for eliminating racial, income-based, and other disparities in health outcomes:

[T]he only way to eliminate disparities in health outcomes is to equalize services outside the health care area. Health depends on the education we have, the food we eat, the cars we drive, and the friends we make. Equalization in all these areas sends us once again down an egalitarian sinkhole…

The great failing of [the mandate-and-subsidize] approach is that it takes as given the huge regulatory apparatus that now places a hammerlock on the sensible provision of health care. Better it be started at the other side of the problem, by asking which of our myriad forms of regulation are justified on efficiency grounds. Our state-based medical licensing system imposes sharp restriction on the free flow of labor across state lines. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) imposes numerous restrictions on the use and transfer of information that drive up the cost of medical care in the name of the protection of patient privacy. A costly and unreliable medical malpractice system leads to the closure of desperately needed facilities that serve marginal communities. Medicare offers huge subsidies for affluent seniors on the backs of people with a fraction of those affluent seniors’ come. Most importantly, perhaps, constant barriers are thrown in the path of nonmedical firms entering the market to supply health care. Why not let people pay for their own health care at a Walgreens clinic instead of waiting in an emergency room, which is the worst place to provide medical care for indigent patients?

The first order of business in my view is to resist any plea for a direct attack on disparities in health care. Put any consideration of new schemes of redistribution last. Put first a relentless reexamination of every single regulatory structure now in place, in the hope that it could be either shrunk or dismantled.