One day before $85 billion worth of automatic, across-the-board cuts to domestic and defense programs kicked in, a panel of five policy experts painted a dire picture of the effects on communities of color, including Latinos, Native Americans, Asians and African Americans.

One specialist, Ellen Nissenbaum, senior vice president for Government Affairs at the Center on Budget & Policy Priorities in Northwest, said sequestration could have been avoided.

"This is absolutely a man-made creation. We didn't ever foresee sequestration which is the victory of their goals," she said of the Republicans in Congress who refused to come to an agreement with President Barack Obama and their Democratic counterparts. "Everyone agreed to 10 years with a hammer. But the hammer is so attractive to some representatives."

---

At an event hosted by the Northwest-based Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, titled, "The Impact of Sequestration on the Health and Well-Being of Communities of Color", panelists said minority communities who depend on federal assistance programs will be disproportionately affected.

"While most Americans will feel the impact of the sequestration, it will have a devastating effect on communities of color as the budget axe falls on programs that many low-income people rely upon to stay healthy," said Ralph B. Everett, president and CEO of the Joint Center at the March 1 discussion. "To pull the rug out from under them would not be wise. Without investment today, we will pay a higher price down the road."

Read more at The Washington Informer.

Roland Martin talks to Dr. Brian Smedley and Rep. Marcia Fudge about the effects of the sequestration on minorities.

A transcript of this interview can be found at Roland Martin Reports.

Dreaded automatic federal spending cuts, otherwise known as “sequestration,” swept into Washington on Friday. Eleventh hour meetings were hastily scheduled, yet players on both sides of the aisle seemed resigned to the reality of $86 billion suddenly snatched from the federal budget.

Opposing sides argued all week over how severe the cuts would be and whose idea it was in the first place. However, the stubborn resolves of Democrats and Republicans on and off Capitol Hill offered little hope of any foreseeable compromise.

“There’s another huge event that takes place that could be even worse, and that’s when the Continuing Resolution on March 27 takes place,” Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) told the Tribune. Meeks is holding out hope that a deal can be reached some time before Congress negotiates short-term spending plans by the end of March. Some observers are counting on that moment when House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) can finally sit down and avoid fiscal calamity.

---

Experts worry most about the unemployment benefits being reduced by 10 percent – not good for African Americans who are still facing a jobless rate double the national average. And even as local communities fret over struggling school systems, the sequester axe takes no prisoners on education when cutting $3 billion in financial aid for low income students and in desperately needed school programs servicing at-risk youth.

Also alarming is the impact sequestration would have on key public health services affecting people of color, especially women and children. “Sequestration would result in 25,000 fewer breast and cervical cancer screenings, 42,000 fewer HIV tests and 900,000 fewer patients served at Community Health Centers,” says Dr. Brian Smedley, vice president and director of the Health Policy Institute at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. “There are just so many vital programs that detect chronic diseases earlier, and this is critical since we have a higher burden of disease in the community.”

Read more at The Philadelphia Tribune.

The budget cuts known as "the sequester" will hit communities of color particularly hard when they take effect Friday, according to a panel discussion Thursday at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington.

The sequester, as the cuts are known inside the Beltway, "hampers federal efforts to protect health, prevent disease and disability, and promote opportunity for communities already burdened by risks for poor health," said Brian D. Smedley of the JCPES.

While the poor are shielded from many cuts (Social Security and Medicaid are exempt), the sequester will affect some programs that disproportionately serve people of color. Screenings and tests offered through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will be cut, according to the JCPES, as will federal funding for community health centers and early childhood care and education programs, as well as WIC, the program that provides supplemental nutrition for women, infants, and children.

In practical terms, that means CDC would provide 424,000 fewer HIV tests and 25,000 fewer breast and cervical cancer screenings for low-income, high-risk women, the JCPES said, citing a recent House Appropriations Committee report. Federal funding for community health centers would be cut by $120 million, which could mean that 900,000 fewer patients would be served. About 70,000 children would lose access to Head Start, and 600,000 low-income pregnant and breastfeeding women and their children could be cut from the WIC rolls.

Because racial and ethnic minorities, who represent 37 percent of the overall U.S. population, disproportionately use those services, panelists worry that those communities will be hit hard by the cuts.

Read more at National Journal.

Dr. Brian Smedley delivers the keynote address at the 34th Annual Minority Health Conference at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Five policy experts delved into details on how impending sequestration cuts will further disadvantage those who depend on federal assistance programs, particularly people of color, during a Thursday panel discussion at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

At the event, entitled The Impact of Sequestration on the Health and Well-Being of Communities of Color and held on the eve of the sequestration’s March 1 effective date, panel members discussed the array of health, human development, and environmental programs that are important to communities of color and which face particularly devastating cuts.  Among them are the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), Head Start, HIV prevention and testing, and the federal program that provides low-income, uninsured, and underinsured women access to breast and cervical cancer screening and diagnostic testing.  

Brian Smedley, Ph.D., Vice President of the Joint Center and Director of its Health Policy Institute, reported that the sequestration will result in 600,000 women, infants, and children losing WIC services, 70,000 children losing access to Head Start programs, 900,000 fewer patients served by community health centers and 25,000 fewer cancer screenings and 424,000 fewer HIV tests being covered by CDC funds. The proportion of people of color in each program ranges from 46 to 77 percent, he said.
 

Download the entire press release by clicking the icon below.

A panel of experts will discuss the potential impact of the sequestration program cuts on communities of color at a Thursday morning event hosted by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

The event will take place on Thursday, February 28, 2013 from 8:30 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. at the Joint Center, located at 805 Fifteenth Street, NW, in Washington, DC. The package of automatic across-the-board spending cuts will go into effect on Friday, March 1, unless President Obama and Members of Congress are able to hammer out an agreement to avoid the harmful impact they are expected to have on the economy, jobs, and the most vulnerable members of society.

“While most Americans will feel the impact of the sequestration, these cuts will have a particularly devastating effect on communities of color, where many people are still struggling to join the economic recovery,” said Ralph B. Everett, the Joint Center’s President and CEO.  “To pull the rug out from under them would be destructive and would not serve the nation well.”  

The participants for Thursday’s panel are:

• Ellen Nissenbaum, Senior Vice President for Government Affairs, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities;
• Liany Elba Arroyo, Associate Director, Education and Children's Policy Project, National Council of La Raza;
• Amber D. Ebarb, Program Manager, Policy Research Center, National Congress of American Indians;
• Priscilla Huang, J.D., Policy Director, Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum;
• Brian Smedley, Ph.D., Vice President and Director, Health Policy Institute, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies;
• Ralph B. Everett, Esq., President and CEO, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies (Moderator)

To read the entire press release, click the icon below. For event information and registration, visit our Events page.

Deborah Lewis is a licensed social worker serving court-referred elderly clients in the Washington, D.C. metro area. Her work takes her to two hospitals, each in different zip codes in the city. She recently sat in the outpatient waiting area in the two different hospitals within a 48-hour period.

She was shocked and dismayed by the stark contrasts in the "health" of the populations at each location.

The predominately middle-class, largely white, elderly outpatients at one hospital were walking without walkers. Most were clearly there for wellness and prevention services.

Across town in the largest hospital serving African-Americans and Latinos, Deborah recalled being overwhelmed by the high levels of debilitation among these outpatients -- wheelchairs, walkers, canes were the norm, not the exception. Most of these patients were struggling to manage chronic diseases.

It was for her, an African-American professional and a baby boomer, a painful reminder that where you live in America makes a significant difference in your risk for illness and premature death.

Here in the United States, a zip code can tell us a lot about how well and how long you'll live. So can census tracts. Most people are stunned to hear the differences:

• In Bernalillo County, N.M., home to Albuquerque, people in some census tracts live an average of 22 years less than those in other some tracts.
• In Boston, the difference in life expectancy by census tracts is 33 years.
• In Cook County, Ill., which includes Chicago, the difference is 18 years. (These figures come from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies' Place Matters reports.)

What's behind these differences in life expectancy? Disparities in neighborhood conditions. Our history of residential segregation has concentrated not just certain communities (typically communities of color), but also poverty.

Read more at The Huffington Post.

The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies today released a report documenting how neighborhood social and economic conditions in Baltimore powerfully shape racial and ethnic health inequities in the city.

The report, Place Matters for Health in Baltimore: Ensuring Opportunities for Good Health for All, finds that residents’ place of residence is an important indicator of their 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 Baltimore Place Matters team, Equity Matters, Inc., 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 Baltimore—particularly as it relates to the quality of housing and educational opportunities—and documents their relationship to the health status of the city’s residents.

Read more at KTRE-TV.

U.S. Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) today joined U.S. Congressman Elijah Cummings and members of The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies at a press conference about the Center’s report detailing health inequities among different Baltimore communities.   The report documented a nearly 30-year difference in life expectancy between minority, low-income neighborhoods and wealthy, more affluent neighborhoods.

The study was conducted by the Joint Center with a grant from the National Institutes of Minority Health and Health Disparities.  In the Affordable Care Act, Senator Cardin authored the provision elevating the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities to an Institute and establishing the Offices of Minority Health within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“This landmark report by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies calls attention to the significant health inequities in Baltimore’s neighborhoods,” said Senator Cardin. “These gaps, such as the 30-year difference in life expectancy documented in the report, are unacceptable and preventable.    As the report shows, health disparities are linked to inequitable social and economic conditions in Baltimore, and we can and must take steps to eliminate them.  As a Senator with a long-standing record of working to promote health equity, including my legislation establishing Offices of Minority Health throughout HHS and elevating NIH’s National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities to an Institute, I welcome this study as another tool to help us move forward to ensure that every American has an opportunity to live a healthy life.”

Read more at the Office of Senator Ben Cardin.