The State of Opportunity

Alan Jenkins on The Tavis Smiley Show

Listen to the Tavis Smiley Show as The Opportunity Agenda's Executive Director, Alan Jenkins, joins Tavis to discuss issues as part of Smiley's series Below the Line: The Changing Face of American Poverty.

The Tavis Smiley Show airs nationally on Public Radio International (PRI) affiliates.

Happenings in Media

• The Health Care Blog has run a series of posts about the Health 2.0 conference on September 20 in San Francisco.  Meant to empower consumers to take charge of their health decisions through new technology, the convention focused on the capacity of tools such as social networking sites, blogs, specialized medical search engines and video sharing sites to transform access to health care.
• Racialicious and New Demographic have released the newest podcast in their 'Addicted to Race' series, themed on the 'New Yellow Peril.' The podcast discusses the recent increase in anti-Chinese narratives in the news.  Comments on the podcast are welcome.

"Between the lead paint toy scare, the tainted pet food scare, and the general rise of China’s economic and military might, all the anti-Chinese sentiments we’ve been hearing lately sound awfully similar to the anti-Chinese sentiments at the turn of the century."

• Another great usage of Web 2.0 is the ImmigrationProf Blog's 'Immigrant of the Day' series.  In a corner of blogosphere focused largely on individual episodes of violence and legislative battles, it is refreshing to get a regular dosage of success stories which help remind us that people immigrate to the US in search of increased opportunity.  Recent features include Madeleine May Kunin, the Swiss-born ambassador and former governor of Vermont, and comedic musician William Hung from Hong Kong.
• The Huffington Post highlights a MediaWeek article which reports that most political candidates are slow to adopt paid advertising on the internet, choosing instead to stick to traditional media such as television.  Despite a willingness to engage in social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace and a well-defined focus on online fundraising, "most candidates were planning to spend roughly one percent of their total media budgets online, versus the seven percent that most mainstream brands typically spend on the medium."
• Finally, our video 'What Do Human Rights Mean to You?' has been posted on the From Poverty of Opportunity Campaign blog presented by the Heartland Alliance for Human Rights and Human Needs.  The Campaign works to reduce poverty in the state of Illinois by using the framework of human rights to organize communities, advocates and policy leaders into creating social change.

Opportunity Radio Episode 7: Health Equity

Our latest podcast is up.  You can subscribe to it via iTunes or Feedburner, or listen to it via the embedded player below.  You can find it here on our website.

In this episode, our Research Director and Co-Founder Dr. Brian Smedley talks to Rinku Sen, Executive Director of the Applied Research Center, about race and health care.

powered by ODEO

In Case You Missed It . . .

In an article with stunningly bad framing, the AP manages to blame poor african americans for getting ripped off by the insurance companies.  While the overall framing leaves much to be desired, the article does convey some important information, and a quote by our own Alan Jenkins, buried near the bottom, clearly states what should have been the story's principle message:

Alan Jenkins, a former Justice Department official in the Clinton administration who lobbies for minority opportunities, said AP's analysis reinforces a little-discussed reality exposed by Katrina.

"The promise of opportunity isn't equally available," he said. "Race and income has made a big difference in people's ability to start over."

Jenkins said state and federal agencies need to adopt different techniques to reach historically disadvantaged neighborhoods.

The Republic of T has about 5 great posts up analyzing the New Jersey decision on civil unions/gay marriage.  BlackProf has some good stuff on this issue as well.

Radio Open Source ran a fantastic show this week about identity politics in the '06 elections.  Listen to the podcast (mp3).

Finally, the Economic Policy Institute released a paper analyzing minimum wage research and trends.  The findings include:

There is a growing view among economists that the minimum wage offers substantial benefits to low-wage workers without negative effect. Although there are still dissenters, the best recent research has shown that the job loss reported in earlier analyses does not, in fact, occur when the minimum wage is increased. There is little question that the overall impact of a minimum wage is positive, as the following facts make clear:

If the minimum wage were increased nationally to $7.25:

• 14.9 million workers would receive a raise,
• 80% of those affected are adults age 20 or over, and
• 7.3 million children would see their parents income rise.

Podcast: Participate in a Conversation About Health Equity

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:

Read our complete fact sheet.

• 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.

Read our complete fact sheet.