Good health is our greatest asset.

Never is that reality more true than when sitting in a hospital for days on end with an ailing loved one, or finding yourself in need of quality health care during an emergency or sudden illness.

Yet, for too many people of color, the pursuit of good health has long been elusive. Cancer, heart disease, diabetes, stroke and hypertension are leading causes of death for Black people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Add to the list racism, states the Center for Medicare Advocacy.

Knowing this, we could not help but think that racism was involved in the results found in an investigative article published Sept. 24 in The New York Times and in the Richmond Free Press’ Sept. 29-Oct. 31 edition. The article “Profits over patients,” accused the Bon Secours Mercy Health hospital chain, which has several facilities in the Richmond area, of using a poor neighborhood to turn huge profits.

Specifically, the article details the fate of Norman Otey who was rushed by ambulance to Richmond Community Hospital last summer. Blood tests revealed septic shock, the article said, and care in an intensive care unit. However, Richmond Community’s ICU was closed in 2017, requiring Mr. Otey to be transported to another hospital. By then it was too late and Mr. Otey died, becoming yet another statistic of a Black man’s life cut short.

The New York Times article goes on to reveal how Richmond Community’s 104 beds, has a “strapped emergency room and psychiatric ward.

Need a kidney or lung specialist? Not at Richmond Community. MRI? Better head elsewhere because Richmond Community’s machine wasn’t working for two months last summer, according to medical workers who spoke with the New York Times.

The article also points out that Bon Secours, one of America’s largest nonprofit health care chains, has the highest profit margin of any hospital in Virgina,”generating as much as $100 million a year.”

The question of race is raised when one considers that Richmond Community Hospital, founded by Black doctors in the early 1900s, is in a predominantly Black neighborhood saturated with public housing.

Other Bon Secours medical facilities are located in tree-lined, suburban settings. Comfortable seating, Starbucks cafes and amenities often associated with four-or five-star hotels define many of the buildings’ designs. State-of-the-art medical equipment and ever-so-precise billing procedures await patients. Discounts are offered to those who can pay their portion of a $7,000 MRI exam on the spot.

In addition to the disparities found in Richmond Community and Bon Secours hospitals located in wealthier neighborhoods, it was shocking to read that the nonprofit uses a drug program to turn Richmond Community’s “poverty into an asset.” In short, the program, 340B, allows hospitals to buy drugs from manufacturers at a discount—roughly half the average sales price. The hospitals then are allowed to charge patients’ insurers a much higher price for the same drugs, reads The New York Times article.

“Bon Secours was basically laundering money through this poor hospital to its wealthier outposts,” Dr. Lucas English, who worked in Richmond Community’s emergency department until 2018, told the New York Times. “It was all about profits.”

Black people are no strangers to medicine comingled with money. Our history is fraught with examples of our health and well-being being tossed aside for the sake of profit.

A few weeks ago a Free Press front-page article featured former Gov. L. Douglas Wilder’s Virginia Commonwealth University symposium in which he discussed the Medical College of Virginia’s, now VCU Health, removal of a deceased Black man’s heart without his family’s consent. Although the heart of the deceased man, Bruce Tucker, was used in Virginia’s first heart transplant, Mr. Tucker’s son has yet to receive help (aka compensation), the former governor intimated.

There is the story of Henrietta Lacks whose cancer cells are the source of the HeLa cell line, the first immortalized human cell line and one of the most important cell lines in medical research. One can only imagine how much and how many have profited from Mrs. Lacks’ Black body.

And who will ever forget the Tuskegee Syphillis Study that was conducted by the Centers for Disease Control between 1932 and 1972 on a group of nearly 400 Black men with syphillis. The men went untreated during the study, and few records were found in which they gave their consent to participate.

Fifty years ago, the Associated Press published a story about the Tuskegee study. Although the men and their family received some benefits, they were minimal. A class- action lawsuit in 1973 was filed on behalf of the study participants and their families, resulting in a $10 million, out-of-court settlement in 1974.

Medical research, studies and profits go hand and hand.

Yet, for far too many Black people, none of that matters when holding a loved one’s hands in life or death situations.