Just in case you missed it, here’s some of the latest health disparities news, posts and reports from this past week.
Latina.com: Wow! Study Reveals Black Children Are Less Likely to Receive Pain Meds in the ER – “A distrubing study reveals that race may be in a factor in the treatment of children with appendicitis, a painful condition which requires surgery. According to findings published in the Journal of American Medical Association’s JAMA Pediatrics, black children and teens with appendicitis were far less likely to receive pain medication, specifically opioids, than white children during treatment.” >> Read more
Harvard Business Review: Why It’s Hard to Measure Improved Population Health – “Ambitious programs to improve the U.S. health care system typically include improving population health in their objectives. For example, that is one of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s “Triple Aims” (along with improving the patient experience and lowering the per capita cost of care). Similarly, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is designed to improve population health in multiple ways, the most obvious being improved access to care. But the ACA also aims to improve the quality of care, enhance prevention, and promote health through the implementation of affordable care organizations (ACOs) and the establishment of a new Prevention and Public Health Fund.” >> Read more
Marketplace: A more accurate measure of poverty? – “We’ll get an idea of how widely shared the economic recovery is on Wednesday of this week, when the U.S. Census Bureau releases its yearly report on income and poverty in the United States. For the first time, the Supplemental Poverty Measure will come out at the same time. The official poverty measure ignores regional differences in housing and child care costs, and out-of-pocket medical expenses. About 5 years ago, the Census Bureau created the alternative measure to capture the real cost of living.” >> Read more
Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut: Access Health CT Works to Transition HUSKY Recipients and Prepares for Another Open Enrollment – “Access Health CT’s September meeting focused on how the exchange would transition a thousand recipients of HUSKY A to private health care and how it’s preparing for the open enrollment period for 2016, which starts on November 1.” >> Read more
The New York Times: Health Care Gains, but Income Remains Stagnant, the White House Reports – “Nearly nine million people gained health insurance last year, lowering the ranks of the uninsured to 10.4 percent of the population. But there was no statistically significant change in income for the typical American household in 2014, the Obama administration said on Wednesday. Median household income in the United States was $53,660 last year, the Census Bureau reported, and the poverty rate — 14.8 percent — also saw no improvement. About 46.7 million people were in poverty in 2014, the bureau said, the fourth consecutive year in which the number of people in poverty was not statistically different from the official estimate for the prior year.” >> Read more
Health Affairs Blog: Under The ACA, Uninsurance Disparities Narrow For Black And Hispanic Adults – “The study, by Stacey McMorrow, Sharon K. Long, Genevieve M. Kenney, and Nathaniel Anderson, found that by the fourth quarter of 2014 the uninsurance rate for Hispanics (both citizens and noncitizens) had declined to 31.8 percent from 40.1 percent in the third quarter of 2013. During the same period, uninsurance for blacks declined from 25.5 percent to 17.2 percent; and white adult uninsurance was reduced from 14.8 percent to 10.5 percent.” >> Read more