The Healthcare Research and Quality Act of 1999 decreed that the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality develop two annual reports—the National Healthcare Disparities Report (NHDR) and the National Healthcare Quality Report (NHQR)—to track “prevailing disparities in health care delivery.” Soon thereafter, the Healthy People 2010 project articulated the goal of reducing health disparities and delineated a range of performance measures to gauge progress on that front. Such federal initiatives seemed to reflect a realization among policymakers that inequalities exist in access to and quality of care afforded tomany racial/ethnic minorities when compared with the majority population. Researchers and clinicians have consistently determined that these disparities contribute to pervasive gaps in health outcomes among minority populations.