LAUSR

We grew up in an area of the United States with racial inequality, where white and black persons experience disparate opportunities for community inclusion, education, employment, wealth, and wellbeing. As general pediatricians, we felt it was our duty to decrease the impact of these disparities on the health of our patients. Unfortunately, we continue to witness differences by race in the survival, access to care, use of health services, and the development and control of chronic conditions in children. These racial disparities have been reported repeatedly in children throughout the United States for decades.1 The work of Silber and colleagues2 published in the current issue of Pediatrics assesses differences by race in lengths of stay and 30-day readmission rates for hospitalized children with asthma who were enrolled in Medicaid. The work applies rigorous methods to match children across race groups by their other demographic characteristics, comorbid conditions, and history of asthma medication use. Using these methods, the authors found that length of stay and 30-day readmission did not vary significantly by the children’s race. Previous studies of inpatient asthma care using standard risk adjustment methods in children report similar … Address correspondence to Jay G. Berry, MD, MPH, Boston Children’s Hospital, 21 Autumn St, Room 212.2, Boston, MA 02115. E-mail: jay.berry{at}childrens.harvard.edu