My family doctor referred me to a specialist (nothing serious) from whose office I have received a form to fill out and bring with me to my appointment next week. It wants all the usual information about me and my medical history and, especially, my insurance, but then there is a little section that asks for my race, ethnicity, and the language I speak at home. This is required, it says, to satisfy the requirements of the "new government regulations for electronic medical records."
Seriously?
From what I can find on the Internet, tracking this information is intended to help medical organizations understand the needs of the population they serve (if, one presumes, the numbers for each group are large enough to allow generalizations) and to point out disparities in care that might occur among certain racial/ethnic groups.
Seriously?
I looked online for an explanation of the difference between race and ethnicity, which are generally used synonymously. Mostly I found tedious philosophical discussions that boiled down to race being more or less physical and ethnicity being more or less cultural. Nobody gave any examples, but I do recall seeing surveys that ask (for demographic purposes only, of course) for my race or ethnicity (but not both) and sometimes give me a choice between white and Hispanic or white and non-Hispanic. Maybe that's why it asks for both.
So, okay, but what am I supposed to put on those lines? Caucasian / Bohemian? White / American? Actually, I think I'll put this:
Race: Human
Ethnicity: Baby-Boomer
Language spoken at home: Pig Latin
Seriously.
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