Many Black veterans live below the poverty line, often struggling to manage their illnesses. As V.A. hospitals began to stop using race-corrected interpretation of Black patients’ spirometer readings, there was an epiphany: the race correction wasn’t just harming the health of Black patients, it was also hurting them financially.

A full transcript of this episode is available at https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2601976.