NEW YORK, NY — It's already semi-common knowledge that NYC's school system is the most racially segregated in the country. But an uncomfortable new study published in the International Journal of Health Services shows that the city's hospital network, too, exists in a old-fashioned era of "stark," Jim Crow-style racial segregation — with a side of caste system, too.

The study, a joint project between the City University of New York (CUNY) and two universities in Boston, shows that city hospitals run by prestigious academic institutions such as Columbia University, Cornell University and NYU are serving black and low-income residents at roughly half the rate as non-academic city hospitals. "Stark racial segregation persists to this day in New York's hospitals," said study co-author Dr. David Himmelstein, a CUNY professor and Harvard Medical School lecturer who has worked at both academic and non-academic hospitals in NYC.

"Our most prestigious institutions find ways to avoid black and poor patients," Himmelstein said.

This, despite the fact that academic hospitals likewise receive "tax exemptions worth tens of millions of dollars" under the assumption they'll provide "community benefits, including caring for Medicaid and uninsured patients," the study says.

Here's a list of the city's academic hospitals, or at least the ones reprimanded in the new study:

Hospital for Special Surgery (Cornell University)

Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital for Cancer (Cornell University)

Montefiore Medical Center's Weiler Hospital (Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Yeshiva University)

Mount Sinai Medical Center (Icahn School of Medicine)

Hospital for Joint Diseases (NYU)

Langone Medical Center/Tisch Hospital (NYU)

New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center (Columbia)

New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center (Cornell) The core problem with these elite hospitals serving so few black and low-income patients, researchers said, is that in general, they provide more "specialized expertise across a range of clinical services" — especially for complex and/or rare conditions, which minorities and poor people deal with too, of course — and are more likely to have the "latest technologies" available. So overall, their patients are more likely to receive top-of-the-line care.

Not to mention that many of the city's public, non-academic hospitals are facing severe financial hardships and a lack of resources, while many of the academic hospitals "regularly generate multimillion-dollar surpluses," the study says.

Boston's hospitals, by comparison, are "much less segregated by race or health insurance status," researchers found.



So how did NYC's hospital system get so segregated? There appear to be a number of factors. Among them, according to Dr. Himmelstein ("AMC" stands for academic medical center, FYI):