On Thursday, The Opportunity Agenda will record the 7th edition of Opportunity Radio - our monthly podcast. In this edition, Brian Smedley, Research Director and co-founder of The Opportunity Agenda, and director of the Institute of Medicine study "Unequal Treatment," will talk with Rinku Sen, executive director of the Applied Research Center and publisher of Color Lines magazine, about the issue of health care disparities.
Brian and Rinku will define health disparities, discuss the scope of the problem, and explore what Rinku and ARC are doing to combat disparities and help all Americans achieve health equity - or equality in access to, and quality of, care. During this conversation, we would like Brian and Rinku to answer questions posed by you, our readers.
If you have a question about equity, access, and the role that race, ethnicity, and gender play in American health care, please post your question in the comments. Brian and Rinku will do their best to provide answers to your questions during their conversation. If any questions are not addressed during out podcast, we'll do out best to answer those questions in the comments or through an additional blog post.
This is a topic not often addressed in health care debates or in the blogosphere. Even health policy blogs frequently gloss over the topic or avoid it alltogether. Never the less, it is an important issue affecting millions of Americans every day and in many places across the country it is an issue that is getting worse.
No question is too big or small, and we genuinely want to hear from you on this issue. If you'd like to become more informed before diving into the conversation, here are some facts and resources to get you started:
- While about 21% of white Americans were uninsured at any point in 2002, communities of color were more likely to be uninsured at any point (including 28% of African Americans, 44% of Hispanic Americans, 24% of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and 33% of American Indians and Alaska Natives), and are more likely to be dependant upon public sources of health insurance.
- While Hispanic children constitute less than one-fifth of children in the United States, they represent over one-third of uninsured children. Among children in fair or poor health who lack insurance (nearly 570,000 children in 2002), over two-thirds are Hispanic.
- More than 11 million immigrants were uninsured in 2003, contributing to one-quarter of the U.S. uninsured. The uninsurance rate among immigrants increased dramatically in the late 1990s, following the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which imposed a five-year limit on most new immigrants’ ability to participate in public health insurance programs. Prior to and shortly following passage of the Act (between 1994 and 1998), immigrants accounted for about one-third of the increase in the number of uninsured individuals. Between 1998 and 2003 they accounted for 86% of that growth.
- Foreign-born people are 2.5 times more likely than the native-born to lack health insurance, a gap that remains unchanged since 1993.
- African Americans, Hispanics, and the poor and near poor (of all racial and ethnic groups) are more likely than white non-poor groups to face barriers to having a regular source of health care. These gaps have increased since 2000. Over 42% of Hispanic poor and 37% of Hispanic non-poor people lacked a regular source of health care in 2001 and 2002, an increase of more than 30% and 18%, respectively, since 1995 and 1996.
- During this same period, the percentage of poor and near-poor African Americans and whites without a regular source of health care went largely unchanged. But these groups were up to 75% more likely than non-poor African Americans and whites to lack a regular source of health care in 2001 and 2002.
- Minorities are less likely to receive necessary procedures than whites but more likely to receive undesirable treatment than whites, such as limb amputation for diabetes.
- African-American heart patients are less likely than white patients to receive certain kinds of care, such as diagnostic procedures, revascularization procedures, and thrombolytic therapy, even if they have similar patient characteristics.
- Minorities are less likely to be put on waiting lists for kidney transplants or to receive dialysis.
Printer-friendly version
