To overcome racial disparities in health care, Americans must also overcome racism, said health policy analyst Curtis Dance during a panel discussion on racial influences on health care.

"We can't make progress unless we make waves," he said.

Dance was one of five panelists that spoke in the Starr Auditorium in the Kennedy School of Government (KSG) during the discussion "Closing the Gap: Eliminating Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities," part of the second annual African American Labor Leaders Economic Summit.

Stephanie J. Woolhandler, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, described the decline in average health care coverage in the past few decades.

According to Woolhandler there has been a steady increase in the number of Americans without health insurance. This year 44.3 million Americans are uninsured, many of whom are employed, lower-income adults.

The increase in for-profit medicine, such as health management organizations (HMOs), has also hurt both those with and without insurance, she said.

"The quality of for-profit medicine is lower than that of non-profit medicine," Woolhandler said. "In HMOs, there are incentives for cutting back care. There is a lot of dissatisfaction driven by the fact that HMOs don't want to enroll sick people."

She said the United States is one of the few Western countries that do not provide universal health coverage for all citizens, and Americans pay 40 percent more for their coverage than do citizen of most other developed nations.