Diabetic Amputations Highlight Gaps in Quality Care
Amputation Rates Among Diabetics Reflect Systemic Failures
For decades now, the American medical establishment has known how to manage diabetes, and the prognosis for those with access to good health care has become far less dire. Yet across the country, surgeons still perform tens of thousands of diabetic amputations each year. It’s a drastic procedure that stands as a powerful example of the consequences of being poor, uninsured and cut off from a routine system of quality health care.
In California, where doctors performed more than 82,000 diabetic amputations from 2011 to 2017, people who were black or Latino were more than twice as likely as non-Hispanic whites to undergo amputations related to diabetes, a Kaiser Health News analysis found.
