The pandemic highlighted health gaps. She wants that light to do some good

Samantha Artiga has strived for more than 20 years to highlight and fight against inequities in the U.S. health care system, but she says the past three have offered a singular opportunity on that front.

“In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we've really seen a huge surge of recognition of health disparities and increased efforts to address them,” Artiga, who works at the policy nonprofit KFF, told The Hill in a Monday interview. “But I think really what is important for me right now is thinking about how we keep that from being a passing phase and sustain that interest of focus and commitment over the long term.”

Artiga, who serves as vice president and director of KFF’s Racial Equity and Health Policy Program, has spent the broad majority of her career researching the health care issues affecting underserved and marginalized communities, having entered the field straight after obtaining her master’s at George Washington University.

When she first joined KFF, her work focused on Medicaid, the uninsured and low-income populations. She has held many titles at the nonprofit but says that a focus on disparities has been the common factor throughout everything she has done there.

"Over time, that work has continued to develop and expand. And with the creation of our Racial Equity and Health Policy Program, which I now lead, that really represented us doubling down on our long-standing commitment to equity and really identifying it publicly as a major priority focus for the organization," Artiga said.

As with many in the field, her nascent career interests were fostered at home, where her physician father would often speak about his work.

“I grew up listening to stories from him at the dinner table about caring for patients, and I actually vividly remember him talking about some of his early experiences caring for patients with HIV and AIDS when that was first being identified and some of the challenges he was facing in getting those patients care,” she said.

“I think that was probably my first understanding and awareness that there are inequities in people's ability to get the care they need and the role that bias and discrimination can play in people's experiences accessing health care.”

While inspired by her father’s work, Artiga did not see a path in clinical care as a good match for her and instead looked at health policy as an avenue to help and support others in a “meaningful way.”

She says she still wonders, however, what would have happened if she had followed in her father’s footsteps and become a clinical care provider.

“What really matters to me is to be able to do something that I feel like has meaning and purpose and is helping people either individually or collectively,” she said.

Amid the outbreak of the coronavirus, health disparities were brought under a microscope as historically underserved communities lacked the same level of access to vaccines and therapeutics that others were afforded. Communities of color saw disproportionately higher rates of infections and hospitalizations while also encountering barriers to vaccination.

Artiga’s work during the midst of the pandemic identified key disparities in vaccine uptake and the impact of the pandemic across demographics. 

A few months after COVID-19 vaccines became widely available in the U.S., a KFF project that Artiga was a part of identified how Hispanic adults — especially those who primarily speak Spanish — were more likely than their White counterparts to become sick from the coronavirus and also more likely to say they wished to get vaccinated as soon as possible if they had yet to do so.

The research that she and a “very small team of people doing a tremendous amount of work” did during the pandemic, providing comprehensive state-level data on vaccination rates, is among that of which she’s most proud.

"With the COVID-19 vaccination rollout, initially, we saw large disparities in uptake of the vaccination. And when steps were taken to allow community to come in and lead those efforts, identify places where people would feel comfortable getting vaccinated, making them more accessible to people — we really saw improvements there," Artiga said.

As the country emerges from the pandemic, part of maintaining the focus on health equity for Artiga has to do with improving how information is gathered.

“One thing that has really been a priority for me is thinking about better ways to collect and analyze data to really more fully represent the diversity of our population today,” she said. “I think many of today's common practices for collecting and analyzing racial and ethnic data in particular fall short in terms of understanding the experiences of multiracial people; of smaller subsets of the broad racial and ethnic categories; of smaller population groups.”

“As a multiracial person myself, I've had times when I've been frustrated with only having the option to check the ‘other’ box or not really feeling like my identity was really being represented,” added Artiga.

Outside of her professional life, Artiga says that she has found other ways of expanding the conversation over health equity, particularly for future generations. Just as her father spoke about his work with her, she shares conversation about what she does with her own children.

She recalls one day during the height of the pandemic, when she was fielding “endless media calls” about the disparities observed during the outbreak.

“My two sons were at the other side of the table during virtual school while I was doing all these interviews and at some point along the way … my oldest son, Kai, started asking me questions about what I was talking about and what the disparities were and why they were happening,” she recounts.

“That eventually evolved into him being able to kind of explain on his own what the situation was. And, you know, I think it's something that he's become much more attuned to now in terms of the inequities in the world around him. And so, I really wonder how that early understanding is going to shape his role in the world going forward,” she adds. “That's something I'm really interested to see in the future.”