Health equity and total cost of care: Any connection?

I recently interviewed Minnesota Community Measurement's Jim Chase about two new reports: Total Cost of Care and Health Inequities based on race, ethnicity, language and country of origin. As Jim mentioned when I asked, these are two separate projects with no explicit linkage.But after some further pondering, he and I both think that the intersection of the two topics raises interesting questions. In particular:

• Are the poor outcomes of certain groups associated with high costs or are poor results driven by some populations accessing fewer services?

This would be a very interesting question to explore, and since Minnesota has already collected the data it should be straightforward to analyze.Is anyone out there interested in funding a study like this? Please contact me if so.—By healthcare business consultant David E. Williams, president of Health Business Group.