President Obama has written millions of seniors, working poor, middle class Americans and African Americans a prescription for longer and healthier lives. The Supreme Court has sanctioned the heart of the president’s 2010 Affordable Care Act. But the angry crowd from the right wants to tear it up.

What the naysayers don’t understand is that the Affordable Care Act is not just about politics. It’s about life and death.

The Affordable Care Act expands health-care coverage for low-income Americans. It enables everyone to receive recommended preventive services at no cost and expands community-based primary and preventive care. It prevents insurance companies from refusing to cover those with pre-existing conditions, and it enables young adults to continue receiving health insurance coverage through their parents until age 26.

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David Bositis, senior research director for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, says about 36 percent of African Americans have no health insurance vs. 12 percent of whites. Because blacks suffer from hypertension, diabetes and cancer at virtually double the rates of whites, insurance companies would often “cherry pick,” or exclude those with medical problems.

Bositis asked, “I wonder why those who are fighting this law do not care about the high death rate and high rates of the illnesses of black Americans?”


Read more at The Washington Post.

As a child, I watched my father, an African American physician, work in some of the most underserved neighborhoods in our community. He treated medical conditions that had escalated to serious illness and disability because of lack of access to affordable, quality health care. Although he served these communities with hope, it pained him to see how unchecked disease and disability had diminished so much potential in underserved, minority communities. He worked patiently, tirelessly to right this inequity the only way he knew: one patient at a time.

Forty years later, health care access and quality are still woefully unequal and alarming racial disparities still exist. African American babies in Maryland are three times more likely to die before the age of one than white babies. African Americans are four times more likely to visit an emergency room for asthma. When adjusted for age, African Americans in this state are twice as likely to die from diabetes or kidney disease than whites, and are almost twice as likely to lack health insurance.

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Reducing health disparities also lowers costs for all taxpayers. A 2009 report by the Health Policy Institute at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies estimated that between 2003 and 2006, nearly $230 billion in direct medical care costs could have been saved nationwide if racial and ethnic health disparities did not exist. One report of Medicare claims found that African Americans were nearly twice as likely to be hospitalized for such treatable conditions as asthma, hypertension and heart failure, costing Maryland an additional $26 million in 2006. Attracting practitioners to deliver health care services in underserved communities through the Health Enterprise Zones program will help drive down costs while reducing serious illness and disease.


Read more at The Afro.

The U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) represents a significant advancement in the effort to repair the deeply broken U.S. healthcare system and promote equitable opportunities for good health for all.  As long as its provisions are fully funded by Congress, the law will improve access to health insurance for more than 32 million Americans, prevent insurance companies from cherry-picking enrollees and denying claims because of pre-existing conditions, and incentivize more health-care providers to work in medically underserved communities.

The average life expectancy for people in certain parts of New Orleans is just 54 years, according to a new report, meaning that residents there have about the same prospects as people in sub-Saharan African nations such as Cameroon and Angola. In other sections of town, people can expect to live an average of 80 years, putting them in the company of wealthier countries such as New Zealand and the Netherlands.

Along with life expectancy, the report by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and the Orleans PLACE MATTERS initiative analyzes public health across a wide range of measures, ranging from heart disease to violent crime, and maps the results by ZIP code.

The results are sobering.

Read more at the Times-Picayune.

PLACE MATTERS for health in important ways, according to a growing body of research. Differences in neighborhood conditions powerfully predict who is healthy, who is sick, and who lives longer. And because of patterns of residential segregation, these differences are the fundamental causes of health inequities among different racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups.

The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and the Orleans Parish PLACE MATTERS team are very pleased to add to the existing knowledge base with this report, Place Matters for Health in Orleans Parish: Ensuring Opportunities for Good Health for All. The report, supported by a grant from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) of the National Institutes of Health and written in conjunction with the Center on Human Needs at the Virginia Commonwealth University and the Virginia Network for Geospatial Health Research, provides a comprehensive analysis of the range of social, economic, and environmental conditions in Orleans Parish and documents their relationship to the health status of the Parish’s residents.

The study finds that social, economic, and environmental conditions in low-income and non-white neighborhoods make it more difficult for people in these neighborhoods to live healthy lives. Among the study’s key findings are that life expectancy in the Parish varies by as much as 25 years depending on the zip code. Zip codes with the lowest life expectancy tend to have a higher percentage of people of color and low-income residents. Community-level risk factors, such as high concentrations of people living in poverty, overcrowded households, households without a vehicle, and vacant housing are among the factors that predict health inequalities in the Parish.

The overall pattern in this report – and those of others that the Joint Center has conducted with other PLACE MATTERS communities – suggests that we need to tackle the structures and systems that create and perpetuate inequality to fully close racial and ethnic health gaps.

Download the summary here or the full report below.

The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and the Orleans Parish, LA, Place Matters team today released a report documenting how neighborhood social and economic conditions in New Orleans powerfully shape racial and ethnic health inequities in the city.

Place Matters for Health in Orleans Parish: Ensuring Opportunities for Good Health for All finds that residents’ zip codes are an important indicator of the health and health risks.  Importantly, because of persistent racial and class segregation, place of residence is an especially important driver of the poorer health outcomes of the city’s non-white and low-income residents.

The report, prepared by the Joint Center and the Orleans Parish Place Matters team in conjunction with the Center for Human Needs at Virginia Commonwealth University and the Virginia Network for Geospatial Health Research, was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) of the National Institutes of Health.   The study provides a comprehensive analysis of the range of social, economic and environmental conditions in New Orleans – which is the only municipal jurisdiction in the parish – and documents their relationship to the health status of the city’s residents.
 

Many nonwhite populations in the United States have poorer health relative to whites across a wide array of health measures. Many also face greater barriers to accessing high-quality health care than whites, barriers that a growing number of public and private sector actors seeks to eliminate. These efforts, however, have been impaired by an inadequate understanding of race and ethnicity in the U.S. context. What defines a “racial” or “ethnic” group? Why do race and ethnicity matter when it comes to health research and health care? Absent clear answers to these questions, researchers, policy makers, and the general public frequently resort to antiquated assumptions about race, ethnicity, and human variability that obscure a more accurate understanding of the role that these factors play in contributing to health inequities.

This brief serves as a starting point for those who wish to better understand race, ethnicity, and the use of these categories in health. In the first half of the brief, the difference between race and ethnicity is reviewed and an overview of genetics is presented in order to explain why race is in fact not genetic. The second half of this brief reviews the history of race data collection by federal agencies. This history demonstrates the social construction of race by chronicling how race categories
have changed over time. In addition, it reminds us that government agencies are crucial sites for determining what race is and how it will be used. Finally, in the last section of the brief, major challenges to accurate data collection are reviewed and several actions are recommended that the federal governmentcould take to move the field of health and health care disparities research to its next stage.

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The 95819 and 95817 ZIP codes, which encompass much of east Sacramento and Oak Park, respectively, share a border. Each has about 15,000 residents. But an analysis performed by the nonprofit Valley Vision on behalf of local hospitals in 2010 showed that Oak Park residents are more than three times as likely to go to the emergency room for asthma, diabetes or high blood pressure.

This week marks the second anniversary of the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA).  It’s also the week that oral arguments begin before the U.S. Supreme Court to consider the constitutionality of the law.  At minimum, the court will consider whether the law’s requirement that individuals who can afford health insurance coverage should carry it exceeds federal authority to regulate interstate commerce, and whether the law’s provisions to expand the Medicaid program are “coercive” to states.  Years of effort to create legislation that will expand insurance coverage, contain health care costs, and improve the quality of health care hang in the balance, and all Americans will ultimately be affected by how the high court rules.