What your doctor won't see ... If conservatives make healthcare "colorblind.".

THE STORY SEEMED TO BE yet another tale about the battle between science and politics in the Bush era. The facts certainly fit the mold: federal technocrats examine a grave challenge facing America, and political hacks obstruct, censor or otherwise alter their research. But this time it didn't make sense. There was no political payoff; everyone already knew colored folks weren't healthy. So why bother?

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Because the cornerstone of post-civil rights conservative thought was under assault. Few concepts are less malleable than mortality. And thus, few measurements pose a greater threat to the modern right's core supposition of equality than a tally of who lives and dies from preventable and treatable diseases.

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In 1999, Congress ordered the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to begin preparing annual reports on whatever racial and economic disparities may exist in the national healthcare system. The request was a sign of the times. In the previous decade, everybody from Beltway politicos to Ivory Tower academics had reached rare agreement on the idea that Americans' wellness differs greatly according to race.

The resulting document, completed in 2003 and grandly named the National Healthcare Disparities Report, confirmed what was by then a hardening conventional wisdom. "This first report clearly demonstrates that racial, ethnic and socioeconomic disparities are national problems," the authors unflinchingly concluded, "that affect healthcare at all points in the process, at all sites of care, and for all medical conditions." The executive summary further delineated the key findings that "inequality ... persists," that Americans pay "a personal and societal price" for this unevenness and that more research is needed to figure out how to fix it. That June, the technocrats submitted this draft for the standard approval process to then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson (who, as governor of Wisconsin, pioneered "welfare-to-work" programs).