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.

Thursday's Supreme Court ruling upholding the Affordable Care Act solidified both presidential campaigns' health-care talking points, with President Barack Obama's supporters encouraged by an election-year victory and Mitt Romney's backers more determined than ever to repeal "ObamaCare."

While the decision itself is momentous, it doesn't change what either campaign is likely to say about health care policy in America, some observers said.

"The court's decision today to uphold the Affordable Care Act means that health care will probably remain a secondary issue in the upcoming election," said Larry J. Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.

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"It helps Obama," said David A. Bositis, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington think tank focused on issues affecting people of color.

Bositis said if the Obama campaign is smart, it will use popular provisions of the bill in its political advertising.


Read more at Scripps Howard News Service.

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.

This Joint Center webinar features U.S. experts and Mexican leaders who successfully advocated for Mexico's new global warming legislation, highlighting key features of the law and its potential impact on U.S. and international climate politics.

The full webinar can be found here (registration required).

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.

Major cuts to Medicaid would have a disproportionately harsh effect on African-Americans and Latinos, according to a new report released recently by a coalition of major health, civil rights and consumer groups.

The report, "Medicaid: A Lifeline for Blacks and Latinos with Serious Health Care Needs," reveals that making cuts to Medicaid fails to reduce costs, instead it shifts the burden to states, families, hospitals and the uninsured. In fact, in some cases, the report notes, cutting assistance for treatment can actually increase costs over the long run.

"As policymakers consider sharp cutbacks in the Medicaid program, this report brings an important potential consequence of their actions to the table – that cutting Medicaid will likely hit hardest at communities of color and, in particular, those who depend on the program to manage and treat their chronic illnesses," said Ralph B. Everett, president and CEO of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

This article was previously available at The Washington Informer.

From a health equity standpoint, one of the most important provisions of the Affordable Care Act is the requirement that all health and health care institutions that receive federal funds must collect data on the race, ethnicity, and primary language of the patients they serve.  Having this information will allow policymakers, researchers, and advocates understand when, where, and under what circumstances health and health care inequities may occur.  There is disagreement in the field, however, about how to collect this data, and even about what the terms "race" and "ethnicity" mean.
 
In response to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' call for comments, the Joint Center prepared a letter to Secretary Kathleen Sebelius outlining some considerations for the collection of race and ethnicity data, available here.

Recent efforts to sharply cut back funding and support for Medicaid go beyond Washington politics—they threaten the health of millions of Americans. For the past 45 years, Medicaid has been a largely successful program that delivers essential health services to a large segment of the population. Our country‟s most vulnerable citizens, including children, low-income parents, pregnant women, seniors and those with disabilities have all benefited from this social service jointly administered by federal and state governments, as well as the Children‟s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). By expanding coverage and access - as well as financial protection - to many Americans, Medicaid has proved itself to be an effective program that delivers substantial value to the nation at large by improving health outcomes among people who otherwise would not be able to afford basic and necessary health care.

Improving health inequity was a key focus of many of the sessions at the recent American Public Health Association Midyear Meeting.

NewPublicHealth spoke with Brian Smedley, Ph.D., director of the Health Policy Institute at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, D.C. Dr. Smedley spoke about health equity during the meeting.

Read more at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

It's well documented that African Americans and other ethnic minorities have disproportionately higher rates of poor health, including infant mortality and most chronic conditions — heart disease, stroke, cancer, HIV/AIDS, asthma and diabetes, among others. Racial differences in health have persisted for so long that they're largely seen as a standard fact of life, even though, truth is, these differences are avoidable. So when President Barack Obama tasked Congress with sending a health care reform bill to his desk in 2009, the Congressional Black Caucus saw a huge opportunity.

"We'd already introduced a bill called the Health Equity and Accountability Act for the past several Congresses, so our work on this issue started long before the health care reform debate started," Virgin Islands Rep. Donna Christensen told The Root. In response to the president's charge, the CBC members promptly accelerated their efforts to tackle health disparities. They conferred with the National Medical Association and other black health groups, developed benchmarks that they wanted to see in the bill, formed a united front with other ethnic congressional caucuses and met on three occasions with President Obama.

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While the health care reform law achieves a number of important steps to start eliminating racial difference in health quality, it also falls short, say policy experts. Brian Smedley, vice president for the Health Policy Institute at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, underscores Christensen's argument that ZIP code determines a person's health more than genetic code. He argues that the law doesn't put enough resources behind community-based prevention to tackle the reasons that African Americans get so sick in the first place.

"Health care coverage and clinical prevention screenings are important, but they're not the root causes of health inequities. When you look across the gamut of diseases that people of color disproportionately suffer from, at their root are inequitable neighborhood conditions," Smedley told The Root, echoing the problems of abundant fast-food retailers, environmental injustice and a lack of access to outdoor recreational facilities in many low-income neighborhoods of color. He proposes that federal agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, collaborate to make neighborhoods healthier.

Read more at National Public Radio.