Chicago Reporter (https://www.chicagoreporter.com/category/key-issue/health/page/3/)
The petcoke controversy on Chicago’s Southeast Side is another example of the heightened environmental costs of every stage of tar sands oil production — and yet another case of low-income communities of color bearing the brunt of those hardships.
Chicago officials say a new study of Latinos by the National Institutes of Health can help inform health policy in the city.
When Carmen Velasquez first heard about the dismal conditions of healthcare in Chicago’s Spanish-speaking communities, she knew she had to do something to help.
Two years after Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel shut down half of the city’s mental health clinics, the Mental Health Movement is charging that the city “is sabotaging its remaining services by refusing to serve people getting health benefits through the Affordable Care Act.” Tens of thousands of Chicagoans signed up for CountyCare, Cook County’s early rollout of ACA’s Medicaid expansion, but the city chose not to join the CountyCare network. A health department spokesman told the Tribune last month that current clients who enroll in Medicaid will be able to keep seeing their therapists. But a clinic staff member told me recently he’d been instructed not to accept CountyCare enrollees as new patients and to transfer patients who joined CountyCare to private providers. “The city is pushing people out and they’re not following up to see if they are getting care,” said N’Dana Carter of the MHM.
Eight in 10 uninsured Latinos qualify for health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act, according to a new report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The Chicago metropolitan area has among the highest concentration of uninsured Latinos in the nation, with nearly six in 10. There are about 288,000 uninsured Latinos in the city. Many of these Latinos could have some type of coverage under the Medicaid expansion and the health insurance market, which started last month as part of the Affordable Care Act.
A third of uninsured Latinos — or about 3 million — are eligible for state-expanded Medicaid. Twenty-five states have opted out of the plan.
The drug store company’s announcement opens the door for a discussion about who smokes and how to reduce the smoking rate among the nation’s poor.
A new report shows the number of uninsured children in the United States is declining, especially among those living below the poverty line.
Its one-mile oval of green turf sits beneath a clear blue sky, eliciting an elegant appearance and experience. But the Arlington International Racecourse in Chicago’s Northwest suburbs had a secret, and it wasn’t pretty. Danielle Gordon took an official tour of Arlington’s pristine grounds on the suspicion that something was awry. Instead of spending the hour on the sanctioned route, she changed course and happened upon the backstretch. Next to the horse stables and hidden from the crowds were 12-by-12 dormitories made of concrete blocks.
Just before Jeff Kelly Lowenstein’s 2009 nursing home investigation hit the press, the story became all too real with the sudden death of an elderly African-American man named Bennie. Bennie Saxon, an 84-year-old with dementia, fell from a four-story window at Alden Wentworth Rehabilitation and Health Care Center in Greater Grand Crossing on the city’s South Side. Business practices at the facility, owned by Floyd Schlossberg, exemplified what was wrong with Chicago’s nursing homes. Nursing Home Compare, the federal data portal that rates all Medicare- and Medicaid-certified nursing homes, gave the highest grades to two of Schlossberg’s homes with a majority-white population in 2009, Kelly Lowenstein found. But Schlossberg’s majority-black homes, including Alden Wentworth, received failing grades.
The news: The funding and use of Medicare and Medicaid have been a divisive issue during the 2012 presidential debates.Behind the news: According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, public spending on medical programs—such as Medicare and the Children’s Health Insurance Program—increased 89 percent in Illinois since welfare reform in 1994, averaging $3,143 per person in 2010, the latest year for which the data are available. The medical programs’ expenses amounted to 43 percent of spending made on all federal benefit programs in the state.Nationally, per-capita public spending on medical programs has increased at a slower rate than Illinois, growing by 75 percent between 1994 and 2010, from $1,842 to $3,239.Public spending on medical programs has increased because of the rising cost of health care and an aging population in Illinois, said Anne Marie Murphy, who served as the Illinois Medicaid director for the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services until 2006.Medicare and Medicaid costs alone grew 133.8 percent and 100.2 percent, respectively, since 2000 according to The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. And so have the number of Illinois residents who receive medical benefits from the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services. Between fiscal years 2006 and 2011, it increased by 34 percent to about 2.7 million.“This rise is generally due to a poor economy where many have lost jobs, lost income, employers have dropped health insurance coverage and so many more qualify for Illinois Medicaid,” said Murphy, who is now the executive director of Metropolitan Chicago Breast Cancer Task Force.