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In the United States, black patients generally receive lower-quality health care than white patients. Black patients may receive their care from a subgroup of physicians whose qualifications or resources are inferior to those of the physicians who treat white patients.

We performed a cross-sectional analysis of 150,391 visits by black Medicare beneficiaries and white Medicare beneficiaries 65 years of age or older for medical “evaluation and management” who were seen by 4355 primary care physicians who participated in a biannual telephone survey, the 2000–2001 Community Tracking Study Physician Survey.

Most visits by black patients were with a small group of physicians (80 percent of visits were accounted for by 22 percent of physicians) who provided only a small percentage of care to white patients. In a comparison of visits by white patients and black patients, we found that …