April is National Minority Health Month, a time to raise awareness about the well-documented health disparities that continue to affect racial and ethnic minorities, as well as highlight how the Affordable Care Act is reducing those disparities.
Despite the progress that we as a nation have made over the past 50 years, racial and ethnic minorities still lag behind their non-Hispanic white counterparts on many health fronts: Minorities are less likely to get the preventive care they need to stay healthy, more likely to suffer from chronic diseases such as diabetes, colon cancer, asthma, and heart disease, and they are less likely to have access to affordable, quality health care.
The Affordable Care Act, along with the Action Plan to Reduce Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities and the National Stakeholder Strategy for Achieving Health Equity that HHS released one year ago, are helping fight these disparities.
Lack of insurance is a significant driver of health care disparities. More than 1.2 million Latinos, Blacks, Asian Americans and American Indian/Alaska Natives have gained coverage because the new health care law allows millions of young adults to stay on their parents' plans until age 26.
In 2014, new Affordable Insurance Exchanges will make it possible for families, individuals, and small business owners to shop for private health insurance in a new competitive marketplace in their state. And new data suggest that 5.4 million Latinos and 3.8 million African Americans who would otherwise be uninsured will gain coverage by 2016. The health care law also strengthens Medicare for our seniors with many free preventive services, including a free annual wellness visit with their doctor, a 50 percent discount on brand name medications for those in the prescription drug "donut hole," and strong anti-fraud measures. These provisions help ensure our seniors get the care and medicines they need.
We are also focused on preventing diseases before they start. The new health law requires most health insurance plans to cover prevention and wellness benefits with no cost-sharing. These services include well-child visits, blood pressure screenings, pap smears and mammograms for women and flu shots for both children and adults.
Pap smears, for example, are particularly important for Latina women, who contract cervical cancer at twice the rate of their non-Hispanic White counterparts, and mammograms are particularly important for African American women, who are less likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer but are more likely to die from it. In both cases, preventive care can stop these diseases before they become life-threatening.
Finally, we are working to expand access to care in communities nationwide. In addition to supporting community health centers nationwide, under the Action Plan's goal to reduce disparities in access to primary care services, we awarded $28.8 million last August to 67 community health centers, which serve uninsured and underinsured people, to expand and establish new sites, to care for 286,000 additional patients.
To learn more about National Minority Health Month and what the Department of Health and Human Services is doing to reduce minority health disparities and achieve health equity, see http://www.minorityhealth.hhs.gov/Actnow/.
To learn more about the law, go to www.healthcare.gov.
For more by Sec. Kathleen Sebelius, click here.
For more on health care, click here.
Andrew Pavelyev: Individual Mandate Not Necessary for Universal Coverage
Andrew Grant-Thomas, Ph.D.: Race-ing the Gap Between Good Health Care Coverage and Great Health
Francesca Biller-Safran: Minorities and Health Care: What's the Real Story?
Minority Health Care, Access to Care, Racial Disparities - Health ...
Health Care: Minority Health Subdirectory Page
Minorities cite health care disparities - USATODAY.com
Report finds minorities get poorer health care - CNN
Why Racial Disparities in Health Care Persist - The Daily Beast
Strategies for Improving Minority Healthcare Quality - NCBI Bookshelf
People in the society should pay just for being healthy to help out those more unfortunate who have the misfortune to get a disease or disability. After all, in the choice, the vast majority of people rather still be healthy and pay than be sick and get a treatment/surgery.
For example, health insurance companies ought to eagerly pay for preventive care. The least expensive health condition to treat is the one you do not get and the old saying 'an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure' might be updated to say 'a penny of prevention saves a dollar of cure.' Health screenings, routine physical exams, testing to identify those at risk for diabetes, high blood pressure, etc. are in the best interests of people, insurance companies and the employers who pay the majority of health care costs.
Some states do not provide cost of living increases to their retirees and yet raise the premiums and reduce the benefits to their retirees over and over again. The federal government might consider looking at these practices since it only hurts the retirees it is supposed to serve.
People who are retired should not be considered as a drag on society, but honored for their years of service in their profession. To make health care even more expensive to a retiree than it was during their time of service is a disgrace.
In short, we can't afford it.