This is interesting

[TheRealJoeFish]

Check this out, guys.

http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mi...-heres-why

Why Black Americans Die Younger

Not all babies are born under equal circumstances, and they don't grow up the same way, either.

Poverty is a major factor.  Blacks tend to have significantly worse eating habits which leads to all sorts of medical conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure which in turn leads to kidney disease and cardiovascular issues.  It's a little misleading to say that "end-of-life" care differs when you are comparing an 85 year old white with multiple organ failure and a 75 year old black with diabetes or kidney disease.

Something along these lines was my first thought as well: I couldn't tell whether age had been controlled for, and it seems natural that younger patients will receive (and ask for) more aggressive care. So, if the average age of a black end-of-life patient is lower than the average age of a white end-of-life patient, that would be a conflating factor that would contribute.

I do think the religious thing is another factor, although probably a small one, and there's all kinds of conflating factors there too. For instance, we know that living in the rural south is correlated with lower income, lower education, and higher rate of belief in certain denominations of Christianity that, for lack of a better way of putting it, believe in a little more 'direct' intervention in human affairs (as opposed to, say, Catholicism). It could be the case that all of these factors conspire to make a rural southerner less likely to accept a diagnosis of brain death or organ failure or need for transplant or anything along those lines. Of course, a higher percentage of rural southerners are black than the average population, so this set of correlations could contribute as well.

All in all I find this very interesting.