Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Racial Disparities In Mortality Risks In A Sample Of The U.S. Medicare Population, Yijie Zhou, Francesca Dominici, Thomas A. Louis

Johns Hopkins University, Dept. of Biostatistics Working Papers

Racial disparities in mortality risks adjusted by socioeconomic status (SES) are not well understood. To add to the understanding of racial disparities, we construct and analyze a data set that links, at individual and zip code levels, three government databases: Medicare, Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey and U.S. Census. Our study population includes more than 4 million Medicare enrollees residing in 2095 zip codes in the Northeast region of U.S. We develop hierarchical models to estimate Black-White disparity in risk of death, adjusted by both individual-level and zip codelevel income. We define population-level attributable risk (AR), relative attributable risk (RAR) and …