New Managed Care Findings Reported from Brown University (Medicare Advantage Networks Include Few Black or Hispanic Physicians, Making Concordant Care Inaccessible for Many): Managed Care

2025 APR 29 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Health Policy and Law Daily -- Investigators publish new report on Managed Care. According to news reporting from Providence, Rhode Island, by NewsRx journalists, research stated, “Black and Hispanic patients who receive care from Black and Hispanic physicians have greater use of preventive care. However, receiving care from racially concordant physicians requires that such physicians are included in private insurance plan networks.”

Financial support for this research came from National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, National Institutes of Health.

The news correspondents obtained a quote from the research from Brown University, “Using data from 2019, we examined the extent to which racially concordant physicians are available in the Medicare Advantage (MA) program, which disproportionately enrolls Black and Hispanic Medicare beneficiaries, by linking MA physician networks to physician race and ethnicity to measure the diversity of in-network physicians. On average, 51.1 percent of White physicians in a given beneficiary’s county were included in their MA network, compared with 43.2 percent of Black physicians and 44.0 percent of Hispanic physicians. Approximately 20 percent of Black and Hispanic beneficiaries had no available Black or Hispanic physicians included in their MA network, and roughly 41.3 percent and 47.2 percent of counties had no Black or Hispanic physicians, respectively, in any MA network.”

According to the news reporters, the research concluded: “Our study raises significant concerns about the availability of Black and Hispanic physicians in the MA program.”

This research has been peer-reviewed.

For more information on this research see: Medicare Advantage Networks Include Few Black or Hispanic Physicians, Making Concordant Care Inaccessible for Many. Health Affairs, 2025;44(1):40-47. Health Affairs can be contacted at: Project Hope, 7500 Old Georgetown Rd, Ste 600, Bethesda, MD 20814-6133, USA.

Our news journalists report that additional information may be obtained by contacting David J. Meyers, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, United States. Additional authors for this research include Maricruz Rivera-Hernandez, Momotazur Rahman, Eunhae Grace Oh and Amal N. Trivedi.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2024.00662. This DOI is a link to an online electronic document that is either free or for purchase, and can be your direct source for a journal article and its citation.

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