Op-Ed: Black maternal health crisis: It’s time now for action (part 2) – The Philadelphia Sunday Sun

By A. Bruce Crawley Following that recognition, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) announced a goal in 1970 to increase the enrollment of Black medical students in its schools to 12%. However, over the past 50 years, that enrollment goal has not been met, and as of 2019 the percentage of Black medical school enrollees at large in mainstream schools had not reached even 8%. Making matters much worse, from 1990 to 2000, 296 urban hospitals were closed across the country. In 2023, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reported that more than 400 maternity services had closed nationwide between 2006 and 2020. Between March and June 2022 alone, 11 health systems announced that they were closing their obstetric services. Ominously in the year 1996, a New York investment firm, Forstman, Little & Company, acquired Tennessee’s Community Health Systems (CHS) at a price close to $1.5 billion. Subsequently, CHS played an important role in the closing of 129 hospitals. In 2014, CHS comprised nearly 200 hospitals, the vast majority of which were located in the southeast and southwest regions of the country where 56% of the national Black population still resides. By 2023, the company’s hospital holdings...