United Way Common Good Forecaster

Common Good Forecaster

The United Way and the American Human Development Project have created a tool to forecast how the outlook changes when educational outcomes are better. Users can enter their states and counties to see what factors such as high school and college completion can do to improve such areas as health, finance and community involvement.

A tool to estimate how educational attainment affects health, SES, and community involvement.

http://liveunited.org/sites/commongood/index.php/pages/common-good-forecaster

Young Black Children and Children of Single Mothers Fare Worst in 2009 Rural Poverty Rates

Measuring by race, place, and family, poverty rates are highlighted for two rural groups--young lack children and children of single mothers--who each face rates around 50%.

Read the brief Beth Mattingly and Jessica Bean:
The Unequal Distribution of Child Poverty

Visit the Carsey Institute

Poverty in Black and White, and Latino and Asian

The fact that one in every seven Americans live below the poverty line is inexcusable.

Yesterday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that those making more than $250,000 were "the people who were hit hardest by this recession":

If you look deeper at the data, the story of who has actually been "hit hardest" is clear:

• More than one in four black and Hispanic people live below the poverty line
• Hispanics saw the biggest jump in poverty (2.1%)
• The biggest drop in real income was among black people and on-citizens (4.4% and 4.5% drop, respectively)

But this is not about numbers. It's about real people and real suffering.

Read the whole piece at Huffington Post

The Social Mission of Medical Education: Ranking the Schools

Medical Schools in the United States serve many functions, but one of their most basic purposes is to educate physicians to care for the national population.

64,043 active practicing physicians who attended medical school between 1999 and 2001, found substantial variation in the success of individual U.S. Medical Schools in recruiting and educating students to address the social mission of medical education, defined as graduating physicians who practice primary care and work in underseved areas and recruiting and graduating young physicians who are underrepresented minorities.

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Oral Health Checkup: Progress in Tough Fiscal Times?

Almost ten years after the surgeon general’s report designating dental disease as the “silent epidemic,” the nation continues to struggle with adequate access to and utilization of dental services. This is particularly true for low-income individuals, who experience more than twice the amount of untreated dental disease as their higher-income peers.

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South Los Angeles Health Equity Scorecard

Read the scorecard >

On the Economic Burden of Health Inequities

The Joint Center for Economic and Political Studies, a leading think-tank on health inequities and the SDOH (they co-sponsored Unnatural Causes), commissioned a paper on the economic burden of health inequities. The paper, produced via a collaboration between researchers at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Michigan.

Read an executive summary and commentary by Daniel Goldberg.

Racial HIV Disparities Are An Indictment Of The US Response To The Epidemic

HIV prevalence among African Americans is ten times greater than the prevalence among whites. This racial disparity in HIV prevalence has persisted in the face of both governmental and private actions, involving many billions of dollars, to combat HIV. In the November 2009 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill examine factors responsible for the stark racial disparities in HIV infection in the U.S. and the now concentrated epidemic among African Americans.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 45% of new HIV infections in the U.S. in 2006 occurred among non-Hispanic blacks. Among the 13,184 adolescents and young adults in The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a nationally representative study, HIV seroprevalence was almost 0.5% among blacks - 20 times that of whites.

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Study Finds Racial Inequalities Cost U.S. Health System Over $50 Billion a Year

Racial inequalities in health care access and quality added more than $50 billion a year in direct U.S. health care costs over a four-year period according to a study released today by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington-based think tank.

In this study, researchers at Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland found that over 30 percent of direct medical expenditures for African Americans, Asian Americans and Hispanics were excess costs linked to health inequalities. Between 2003 and 2006, these excess costs were $229.4 billion.

Further, the researchers estimated that the indirect costs of racial inequalities associated with illness and premature death amounted to more than a trillion dollars over the same time period. Eliminating these inequalities would have saved the U.S. economy a grand total of $1.24 trillion dollars. The study noted that this four-year $1.24 trillion expenditure is more than the annual gross domestic product of India, the world's 12th largest economy.

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Community-Based Solutions to Reduce Inequities in Health and Safety

The report "A Time of Opportunity: Local Solutions to Reduce Inequities in Health and Safety" was presented to the Institute of Medicine Roundtable on Health Disparities in May.

New Brief on Racial and Socio-economic Inequities

The Health Policy Institute of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies has released a new brief on racial and socio-economic inequities in activity limitation among children.

Eliminating Health Disparities ‘From A Grass Roots Perspective’

The state of Louisiana, Department of Health and Hospitals released a report, "Eliminating Health Disparities ‘From A Grass Roots Perspective,’" for the Office of the Secretary, Department of Health and Hospitals by Bureau of Minority Health Access.

The purpose of this report is to detail the Bureau’s progress toward creating a state action plan to eliminate health disparities among racial and ethnic minorities. This report will provide an overview of the Bureau and its responsibilities. In the following pages, information, diagrams, maps, and charts are included to demonstrate certain aspects of the health status and disease prevalence of Louisiana’s citizens. This information can provide direction in assessing and planning for disease prevention as well as accessing health care and education for Louisiana’s multicultural populations and communities. Lastly, this report will highlight supplementary activities that the Bureau has initiated or participated in that contribute toward the goal of

improving the health and well-being of Louisiana, particularly communities of color.