David here. A friend of mine (we'll call her Sarah) is spending the spring in Ghana, working in local schools to teach children English, among other subjects. Over the weekend, she and a few friends in her program planned to hop over to Benin to cover more West African ground.

Unfortunately, she became ill on the journey, and ended up in a Ghanaian hospital, never making it to Benin.

Doctors there diagnosed here with malaria, though, according to Sarah, that's what everybody is diagnosed with, at least initially. (An experienced traveler, Sarah knew to start a malaria medication regimen before arriving in Ghana.)

Despite some unnerving aspects of her hospital stay, such as hospital officials refusing to let her friends stay with her, Sarah emerged healthy after a weekend of rest and swallowing pills that she couldn't identify.

Total cost of her four-day hospital stay, with tests and medication?

CONTINUED »

And here I was thinking that all Muslims were terrorists! A new report from the Institute of Social Policy and Understanding examines how Muslim medical clinics in the inner city are providing much-needed health care for blacks and Hispanics.

The report, "Caring for Our Neighbors: How Muslim Community-Based Health Organizations are Bridging the Healthcare Gap in America," outlines how Muslim community-based health organizations are providing a health safety net for underserved populations and "provides a deeper understanding of the motivations that drive American-Muslim health providers, the demographic makeup of the populations they serve and the clinics' growing role in American public health and community building," according to the ISPU Web site (ISPU Web site, 4/11).

Study author Lance Laird, an ISPU fellow and assistant professor of pediatrics at the Boston University School of Medicine, said, "The message I want to convey is these Muslim clinics represent a trend in what Muslim communities are doing to address fundamental problems in the U.S." He adds, "When we think of faith-based groups, we shouldn't think of Protestants, Catholics and Jews, but other minority organizations."

Los Angeles, Detroit, Houston and Chicago-area clinics were featured in the report. [Kaiser]

Surprise! Minorities in the US are more likely than whites to rate their health care as poor. This opinion is most prevalent amongst blacks born in Africa, Vietnamese Americans, Chinese Americans and, though they weren't included in the study, thousands from America's shivering homeless minority.

Researchers at Harvard surveyed more than 4,000 adults and asked them questions like how quickly they were able to get an appointment when sick and whether their doctor explained things in a way the patient could understand.

91 percent of whites rated their care as excellent or good compared to 72 percent of Vietnamese Americans and 73 percent of blacks born in Africa. About three-quarters of whites also reported that their doctor listened carefully to them. That percentage dropped to 58 percent for patients from Central or South America.

According to experts, these study results are pretty much par for the course.

To be fair, many whites think our country's health care is shit, too. But, as you may recall, the inequality of America's health care system has been problematic for years, and it's one of the reasons our fucking unbelievably rich nation came in just behind Costa Rica in the WHO's rankings of the world's health systems.

• If you're like Bill O'Reilly and have no earthly idea what a "gangsta rapper" is, by all means, call Virginia Tech and protest Nas's planned performance there. [BOB]

• While I wouldn't describe Remy Ma's current situation as good, things are looking better for her shooting case than they were last month. [NYDN]

• C'mon! Elvis Presley had to have been just a little bit racist, right? [HC]

• FedEx was ordered to hand over $55 million to a bunch of black and hispanic workers who were discriminated against by the company's human resources department. [BI]

• In Massachusetts' universal health care plan ever going to work? Because right now it's kind of a mess. [MSNBC]

In a study that tells every person in America who has health care (or is struggling to get it) something they've been knowing, researchers found that we have the poorest and priciest health care compared to five other rich countries. Surprisingly, Canada, a country that everyone holds on a health care pedestal, was the second worst. When we are up against five countries — Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Britain — that offer universal health care, there's no way we could even come close to having the best system.

CONTINUED »