In 1991, Medicare began paying for older women to undergo preventive mammograms with the hope that breast cancer mortality rates would go down. Rates did decrease, however there is new research that indicates black women as a group did not benefit as white women.

According to the lead author of the study, Dr. Robert Levine, professor of family and community medicine department at Meharry Medical College in Nashville TN, "it looks like the implementation of the Medicare benefit did a lot of good, "but the benefits may not have accrued to everyone equally."

Levine and his colleagues looked at death certificate statistics from 1979 to 2003, to see if Medicare's change in policy was linked with improved mortality rates. They found that the death rates among black and white women fell after 1993. The number of breast cancer deaths per 100,000 dropped from about 134 for both groups in 1991 to 140 among blacks and 111 among whites in 2003. The study also showed that more than 2,400 black women could have avoided breast cancer death if their rates had improved at the same pace.

This study raises questions regarding why minority patients do not get screening tests that are widely available according to Lovell Jones, director of the Center for Research on Minority Health a the University of Texas, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Jones said that doctors need to establish partnerships with community organizations to encourage members of the community to undergo tests. For further information go to http://www.hbns.org

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