New Report on Health Needs, Gaps and Barriers to Care in North and Central Brooklyn Released in Conjunction with Proposed Redesign of Brooklyn’s Health Care System

See below—and congratulations to Shena, Jenn, and Alyssa for their hard work!

Brooklyn, NY (April 10, 2013)—In conjunction with the proposed redesign of Brooklyn’s Health Care System the Community Health Planning Workgroup (CPHW), a consortium of community stakeholders, healthcare providers and community health planners, today released The Need for Caring in North and Central Brooklyn, A Community Health Needs Assessment, sponsored by The Brooklyn Hospital Center, the I M Foundation, and the New York State Department of Health. The Community Health Needs Assessment, conducted by the Brooklyn Perinatal Network, the Commission on the Public’s Health System, and New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, sheds additional light on North and Central Brooklyn residents’ perception of the needs, gaps and barriers to care in their communities.

The report covers 15 zip codes, including Bedford Stuyvesant, Bushwick, Brownsville, Crown Heights, Cypresss Hills, East Flatbush, East New York, Flatbush, Fort Greene, Prospect Heights, Williamsburg, Downtown Brooklyn, Gowanus and Greenpoint, and addresses key findings, focus group results, and recommendations.

Field surveys and focus groups were used to capture the voices of the community. Community residents completed over 600 surveys, and 79 residents participated in nine focus groups targeting groups underrepresented in the survey sample, including teens; individuals with disabilities; Spanish speakers receiving mental health services; immigrants; men aged 18-35 and 45-55; senior citizens; pregnant women; and LGBTQ individuals.

Following the completion of the Community Health Needs Assessment, listening sessions were held to solicit community input and feedback concerning the findings.

Among the key findings:

• The report found the most common illnesses/health conditions among residents surveyed were high blood pressure/hypertension (24.8%), followed by asthma (19.9%); diabetes (15.7%); and hearing or vision problems (15.2%).
• 85% of respondents said that it would be most convenient to receive care in their neighborhood; almost 20% of the sample (18.7%) received none of their care in their community.
• 50% of residents surveyed said they or members of their household had visited an emergency room in the past two years.
• When asked which healthcare services households had difficulty accessing in their neighborhood, 100% of respondents said a dentist.
• Half of respondents had a limited ability to secure health care services. When asked why, 48% said barriers to health care included quality of care, culture and language differences, hours of service and attitudes of providers; 19.8% said insurance issues or lack of insurance; 23.1% said long waits for or at appointments; and 9.1% said cost of care.

“We are really pleased to have had the opportunity to ensure that the community’s voice is a driving factor in how healthcare is delivered and look forward to the healthcare planning developments that come from the CHNA process. We are hopeful that our process will serve as a model way to meet the needs of communities being served,” said Shena Elrington of New York Lawyers for the Public Interest who served as co-lead partner in the development of the report.

The report concluded with approximately 15 critical recommendations to improve healthcare in Brooklyn. These included addressing accessibility; improving screening, outreach, cultural and linguistic competency, patient-centered care, and customer service training; providing extended hours for primary care; increasing awareness and access to low-cost health services/insurance; providing financial support of efforts by grassroots community-based organizations (CBOs) to promote community resources; coordinating a network of health care and social service providers; engaging community residents; targeting services to focus on particular illnesses and communities; increasing access to specific health care services; working with Access-A-Ride to address transportation issues; increasing the number of providers who accept public health insurance; and increasing availability and access to mental health services.

To read the full report, click here. To read a summary of the report, click here.

The Affordable Care Act and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals: Immigrant Exclusion in Health Reform

by Lindsey Hennawi, Program Assistant

It’s tough to be hard on President Obama just one month away from the presidential election.

After all, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, an unprecedented piece of health care legislation, has been lauded by health justice advocates across the country for its promise to provide uninsured and underinsured Americans with options for health coverage which were previously unavailable to them. And the recently implemented federal policy known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) allows would-be DREAMers—undocumented youth who were brought to the US as children and who would be granted a path to citizenship under the as of yet un-passed Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act—to apply for work authorization and live without fear of being deported.

While these measures are historic, they also both fall short. The strength of the DACA program as a means to advance the rights and status of undocumented immigrants was undermined by a barely publicized announcement from the White House. According to the new rule, DACA individuals will be excluded from health coverage under the Affordable Care Act. In the past, people granted deferred action status were considered “lawfully present” undocumented immigrants and were thus eligible to participate in federal benefits programs. This new policy, however, explicitly exempts those who qualify for DACA relief from participating in these programs.

While some states have systems in place whereby lawfully present undocumented immigrants are still eligible for public health insurance from state pools of funding, this option is not universally available. Without the federal guarantee that lawfully present undocumented immigrants can benefit from the new Exchanges and Medicaid, these individuals will have to rely on whatever standards their state imposes, which can vary widely and may disproportionately impact certain immigrant communities. Some states have already started to deny benefits to DACA beneficiaries. Notorious anti-immigrant Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, for example, has illegally ordered state agencies to deny drivers’ licenses and other state benefits to DACA grantees. Apparently inspired, governors in Mississippi, Nebraska, and Texas have made similar declarations.

As a result of this federal exclusion, hundreds of thousands of undocumented youth who no longer have to worry about being deported still have to worry about how to access health care—an issue President Obama himself has described as central to the very success and character of our democracy.

There are a lot of good, practical reasons why DACA individuals should not be denied benefits under health care reform. The Affordable Care Act, with its pledge to insure the 30 million undocumented American citizens, completely excluded undocumented immigrants. The ACA will gradually reduce federal funding  allocated to compensate hospitals for the care they provide to uninsured and underinsured  patients, and the loss of this funding may threaten these hospitals’ ability to treat undocumented immigrants. The Exchanges, which will serve as a conduit through which people can purchase health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, could benefit from the addition of young, healthy people (such as many DACA individuals) paying into the pool in order to spread risk. And without regular access to affordable primary and preventive care, we will see an increase in negative health outcomes and costs that may ultimately burden the system.

Without inclusive, federal protections for health care access, undocumented immigrants will always be subject to denials of access to care, and the president’s landmark health care reform will fall short of achieving its lofty and sorely needed goal. If President Obama really wants to work toward improving immigrant rights and health—or even just to preserve the American democracy in which he believes—he needs to reconsider and reverse his latest decision. It’s just the right thing to do.

Ready to Leave with No Place to Go

by Shena Elrington, Staff Attorney

Undocumented immigrants lack access to viable long-term care options. This is hardly surprising, given the surge in anti-immigrant sentiment, the serious budget crises facing federal, state and local governments and the piecemeal way in which we approach health care delivery. Although not surprising, the lack of long-term care options has very real consequences for both the lives of these immigrants and the overall well-being of the healthcare system.

A flurry of recent newspaper articles has brought the plight facing undocumented immigrants in need of long-term care into sharp focus. In the typical scenario, an undocumented immigrant suffers a catastrophic injury or illness, such as stroke, and is rushed to the emergency room, where she receives care, as required by federal law. The initial injury or illness may have been so severe that the patient becomes incapacitated, unable to feed or care for herself. The hospital then looks for appropriate long-term care facilities, such as nursing homes, to care for the patient. Finding such a facility, however, is nearly impossible because the patient cannot pay out of pocket and is ineligible for Medicaid because of her immigration status. The hospital, unable to find an appropriate facility to discharge the patient, chooses whether to continue to treat the patient, at a cost of several thousand dollars per day, for an indefinite period of time.

Some undocumented immigrants who find themselves in this precarious situation fare better than others. They all, however, live in a constant state of uncertainty, unsure of when the hospital will stop caring for them. And when the hospital terminates treatment, as it inevitably will, undocumented immigrants are faced with a truly terrifying range of “choices”, leading them closer and closer to death.

In September, a hospital in Atlanta refused to provide dialysis to nearly two dozen undocumented immigrants who had been receiving treatment for years. As deadly toxins built up in their systems, some immigrants sought care at various emergency departments, but were refused treatment because their conditions had not deteriorated significantly enough to trigger the hospital’s duty to provide emergency care under federal law. These immigrants were forced to wait until they were literally at death’s door to receive treatment. After much wrangling and public outrage, the hospital agreed to continue to provide dialysis for three more years.

But, what happens when that three-year period comes to an end?

Some hospitals, acting outside the federal immigration process, actually contract with private transport agencies to have these patients, with or without their consent, flown back to their home countries, without ensuring that there are any healthcare facilities in those countries able to support their needs. In essence, these immigrants are sent home to die. Based on our work with community partners and advocates, we know these “medical deportations” are not isolated events.

The perils undocumented immigrants in need of long-term care face are the direct result of failures in our immigration and health policies. Our current system mandates that hospitals provide care to undocumented immigrants when they are so ill that they require emergency treatment, at the most expensive point of access in the health care system – the emergency room – yet provides no real avenue for them to receive cheaper preventative care or be moved from more expensive acute care facilities to more appropriate, and less expensive, long term care facilities like nursing homes when necessary.

While health reform expanded the number of Americans eligible for Medicaid, it fell short of including undocumented immigrants – prohibiting them from even purchasing insurance within the exchanges. While the majority of undocumented immigrants are young and healthy, it is inevitable that tragedy will strike at one point or another and some immigrants will need long-term care. Our current policies make no provisions for this eventuality. Worst yet, there is virtually no oversight over hospitals that repatriate patients to their home countries, discharging them to family members or facilities abroad that often lack the means to properly care for them. And, there is little to no discussion of the legal and ethical breaches healthcare providers and hospitals may be committing by failing to discharge undocumented immigrants to appropriate healthcare facilities.

We need to discuss these issues, even if talking about them is difficult in a political climate where anti-immigrant sentiment runs rampant and budget cuts seem to always land on the backs of the poor, because some of our most fundamental values are at stake. Just a few weeks ago, we glimpsed the erosion of these values during a Republican presidential nominee debate, when the audience proudly affirmed their willingness to let a hypothetical 30 year old man who needed intensive care die because he opted out of health insurance. There is little doubt that this crowd would feel the same way about an undocumented immigrant in need of care, who had no access to insurance to begin with. Is this really the kind of world we want to live in?

Acknowledging Difference, not Defeat: A Racial Justice Perspective on the Medicaid Debate

This post, by Health Justice Director Nisha Agarwal and Staff Attorney Shena Elrington, also appears on the Race-Talk blog, Huffington Post, and Alternet.

The federal Medicaid program has become something of a policy piñata in the national discourse. Over the course of the past year conservatives have been asking, “is Medicaid real health insurance?” The public insurance program for low-income individuals has been criticized for not providing sufficient access to physicians, long wait times to see a physician when one can be accessed, and poorer quality of care once patients get in the door – all of which conservatives argue are reasons to dismantle the program altogether. If being on Medicaid isn’t much better than being uninsured, why bother spending tax dollars on it?

Meanwhile, a recent editorial in the New York Times offered unequivocal praise for the Medicaid program, pointing to a study conducted in Oregon that allowed researchers to compare the experiences of people who received Medicaid coverage to those who did not. According to the study, Medicaid recipients reported better health than the uninsured recipients  and were less likely to have medical bills sent to  collection agencies or forgo other obligations in order to pay for their medical care. Supporters of the public health insurance plan were therefore able to hit back against conservative naysayers and argue that Medicaid truly is a program worth preserving and expanding.

While the national debate lurches back and forth, we find a more complicated reality on the ground, in the low-income communities of color where we work to eliminate race- and class-based biases in the health care system. The uncomfortable truth is that Medicaid beneficiaries do often receive poorer quality of health care, particularly when it comes to accessing specialists. But to see this you have to look at how Medicaid beneficiaries fare vis-à-vis privately insured individuals, not the uninsured, which has been the focus of current debates.

For example, in  our work with Bronx Health REACH, a faith-based community coalition in the Bronx, we have seen how Medicaid patients seeking specialty services at major New York City hospitals are seen in separate—effectively segregated—facilities from their privately-insured peers, with longer wait times, less experienced doctors, and much less continuity and coordination of care. (You can read more about these problems in this monograph published by the Bronx Health REACH coalition and in this complaint we filed with the New York State Attorney General.)

Working with low-income parents, we have also seen how children with Medicaid have to wait for grotesquely long periods of time before they can get mental health treatment and special education evaluations, if they are able to access these services at all, and how elite institutions providing such services refuse to serve publicly insured populations despite the significant shortage of pediatric mental health providers in New York City.

Our experience thus seems to support conservative arguments to some extent: Medicaid beneficiaries do not have sufficient access to physicians, experience long wait times to see a physician when one can be accessed, and suffer from poor quality of care once they get in the doctor’s door, at least when compared with those patients who are privately insured.

Undoubtedly the current climate surrounding Medicaid makes it difficult for advocates to point out the lower quality of care Medicaid beneficiaries receive, for fear that any criticism of the program will serve as powerful ammunition for the other side to use. But acknowledging certain aspects of the conservative argument need not mean that advocates have to accept the entirety of their conclusions. Something else we’ve learned through our work is that Medicaid isn’t “bad” insurance per se. Rather, healthcare providers and institutions choose to treat Medicaid beneficiaries badly by discriminating against them with respect to the quality of care provided. Consider the Bronx example. Hospitals in New York City (and elsewhere) are not only reimbursed by Medicaid for providing patient care, they also receive over $1 billion through the Medicaid program for non-patient purposes such as resident doctor training – a funding stream so substantial that the New York hospital industry is fighting tooth and nail to keep it safe from federal budget cuts. Medicaid seems to pay hospitals very well, and yet these same hospitals choose to provide segregated and unequal care to Medicaid beneficiaries. Why?

As with many things, these bizarre dynamics cannot be understood without accounting for race, and for the fact that the vast majority of publicly insured individuals in New York City are black and brown. We have heard how top-flight specialists want to be able to choose the patients that they treat, which is invariably code for avoiding people of color who are perceived to be more “complicated” and “non-compliant.” Elite NYC hospitals eager to attract these specialists happily comply to doctors’ demands by giving them fancy facilities to see their preferred patients, while the Medicaid patients are separated out into “clinics”, where they are treated by a rotating band of doctors-in-training.

In addition to wanting to attract renowned specialists, the hospitals want to attract the “right” kind of patients – that is, wealthy, white, suburban patients. Behind closed doors administrators will openly argue that their “‘paying’ patients will not want to sit in the same waiting room as people on Medicaid,” so it is simply better for the hospital to segregate the two groups.

Worse still, these biases become a part of the culture of how medicine is taught, with students and residents working with Medicaid patients in the clinics learning very early on that some patients—the kinds of patients they get to practice on, the poor patients of color—are less worthy than others. Indeed, research has suggested that by the end of their medical education, student doctors actually become more biased than they were when they began medical school. These biases, whether conscious or not, permeate the medical system at both an individual and systemic level, affecting the quality of care that Medicaid beneficiaries receive.

From our perspective, the debate about Medicaid is less about left-and-right and more about black and white. The conservatives’ sleight of hand is to point to quality of care problems for Medicaid beneficiaries and to jump from there to the conclusion that the Medicaid program is to blame, which obscures the mediating role that institutional racism plays in ensuring poor outcomes for Medicaid patients. Meanwhile, supporters of Medicaid effectively erase race from the debate as well by closing their eyes to the many challenges Medicaid beneficiaries face in accessing high-quality health care, despite the fact that they are walking in the door with an insurance that research shows is pretty good. A more nuanced position would acknowledge differences in care without accepting defeat. It is not the Medicaid program that must be dismantled, but the biased attitudes and policies that lead Medicaid patients to get inferior quality of care.

New York Needs Safety Net Hospitals

Here is our op-ed on the Medicaid Redesign Team that ran in today’s Albany Times Union. Comments most welcome!

By Nisha Agarwal and Shena Elrington

Gov. Andrew Cuomo‘s Medicaid Redesign Team was handpicked by him and elected by no one. Though touted as a collection of health care “experts,” the majority of the team’s members have strong ties to special interests in the health care industry.

Not surprisingly, its proposals for cuts reflect the vested interests of its members.

Proposal 67 calls for the closing or downsizing of safety net hospitals that provide health care services in medically under-served areas. We need more health services in these communities, not less, particularly since these communities have been ravaged by hospital closures in recent years.

Central Brooklyn, with its extremely low-income and 90 percent black and Latino population, has lost two hospitals, OB-GYN and prenatal services at two other local hospitals, 13 outpatient clinics, a federally funded health center and at least two women, infants and children program centers that provide nutrition education and assistance in recent years, despite having some of the worst health outcomes in the city.

The infant mortality rate in the Brownsville section of central Brooklyn is nearly five times that of Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Do we really need more hospitals in areas like central Brooklyn to close?

When safety net hospitals close, people are forced to travel farther to see care at the few institutions that remain open — usually elite private academic teaching centers. These are the very same institutions to which many of the Medicaid team’s members have strong connections, raising questions about the appropriateness of using the regulatory process to funnel business to special-interest groups.

What is more, proposals that would actually support safety net institutions and use public dollars in an accountable and transparent way never made it into the final Medicaid reform package.

Proposal 66, for example, would have recalibrated charity care and Medicaid dollars so that the distribution of that funding would be based on the actual Medicaid and uninsured losses. Hospitals in New York now receive “indigent care” funding regardless of the volume of care they actually provide to Medicaid and uninsured patients. So, hospitals that provide very little care to low-income New Yorkers often get more money from the indigent care pool than they deserve, while safety net institutions, which provide a lot of care to Medicaid and uninsured patients, do not get their fair share.

Recalibrating the way this funding is distributed would not only make sense and bolster the financial stability of critical safety net institutions. It also is required under federal health reform and was very favorably ranked through the Medicaid Redesign Team’s own scoring process. Yet, the proposal never made it into the team’s final recommendations.

New York is in the midst of an epic budget crisis. Medicaid is seen as the linchpin to solving that crisis. But its redesign should not be done in such a way as to threaten the very institutions that serve as a safety net for our state’s most vulnerable residents. The erosion of our health care safety net threatens the stability of the system for all of us.

Let’s Go Wisconsin On Them

We are back in New York City after a productive weekend at the black, Latino and Asian legislators caucus in Albany, where we presented on a panel about the Governor’s Medicaid Redesign Team with Judy Wessler from the Commission on the Public’s Health System and Laray Brown from the NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation, among others. Our collective message was clear. In not so many words: the MRT process sucks. The proposals it is considering also, by and large, suck. And the hurt will be felt most acutely by black and brown and immigrant communities across New York State. (Here’s a link to our PowerPoint presentation. Judy presented an overview of the MRT and all its problems, which you can download here, and Laray discussed the impact of the MRT on the city’s public hospitals in particular – click here for her presentation.)

Everyone we spoke to was hella angry about these Medicaid cuts and the means by which they are being made. As one panel attendee said, “we need to go Wisconsin on them!” And, indeed, we are plotting our next moves in advance of the MRT’s announcement of the cuts that it is recommending on March 1. We will keep you posted on this blog, or you can email the Save Our Safety Net Campaign to get up-to-the-minute updates (soscny@gmail.com). In the meantime, here are some important dates to keep in mind:

• February 24 & 25: Next meeting of the Medicaid Redesign Team (open to the public): 10:30 a.m. in Meeting Rooms 2-4, Concourse, Empire State Plaza, in Albany.
• February 28: Meeting of the Medicaid Redesign Team (open to the public): 10:30 a.m. in the Hart Theater of the Egg in Albany
• March 1: Medicaid Redesign Team announces its recommendations

Decisionmaking From on High

Tomorrow, Friday, February 18, is the deadline for members of Governor Cuomo’s Medicaid Redesign Team to submit their “scores” for 49 proposals given to them by the New York State Department of Health that are supposed to generate $2.85 billion–yes, billion–in cuts to the Medicaid program. These 49 were culled from the several thousands received via a severely flawed public hearing and online/written submission process that took place over the last several weeks in cities across the state. Not only were many proposals put forward by consumers and members of the public entirely excluded from the 49 that the Team will ultimately be deciding on, the few that did make it in were inaccurately captured in the bizarre spreadsheet format being used to capture major policy proposals to restructure the state and the country’s largest health insurance program for the poor. Oh, and did we mention that the proposals are going to be scored using Survey Monkey? That’s right, Survey Monkey.

In response, the Save Our Safety Net Campaign, of which we are a part, issued this open letter to the members of the Medicaid Redesign Team, instructing them how to vote on certain key proposals. This is not to say that we accept or buy into the ridiculous “process” that has been put in place by the MRT, but we also can’t remain silent on issues that will significantly impact the communities we care about. You can click here to download a copy of the letter.

Please let us know if you have any comments or concerns. There will still be other opportunities to weigh in on this process. On February 24th, the Medicaid Redesign Team will be meeting to discuss the scored proposals. The meeting will take place in Albany, and it’s important to have consumer voices out in full force. March 1 is when the final recommendations of the Team will be announced. We are planning activities in New York City around the announcement and will keep you posted about details. And, of course, state elected officials will have to weigh in on the recommendations too, and we are hoping that if you are  a New York resident that you will tell your representatives how you feel about the Medicaid program and why it is important to you and your community.

Critical decisions about the health care system in New York should not be made from on high, but from the ground up.

Budget Cuts Bleed in Black and Brown

For the last year and a half, every American paper, news broadcast and radio station has been talking about “budget cuts,” the “financial crisis” and the “recession.” Americans are constantly inundated with these reports, often to the point of over saturation and desensitization. Just this week, for example, we learned about $775 million in cuts to New York State’s health budget. It’s easy in this flurry of information to lose track of what some this financial neglect will mean to New York residents, the actual people who utilize government-supported services simply so they can survive and function in this society. But, of course, budget cuts bleed through real people, and the impact is never race neutral.

Take, for example, the Health and Hospital Corporation (HHC), the public hospital system in New York City, which faces a devastating $1 billion shortfall this year between its costs and expected revenue.  HHC is the quintessential safety net provider: committed to delivering high-quality health care to low-income communities of color and immigrants, when many private hospitals devise subtle and not-so-subtle strategies to drive these patients away.  Last year, HHC had an astonishing 5 million outpatient visits.  That is over half of all New York City clinic visits and 66% of New York City’s overall uninsured patient clinic visits.

Not only did HHC serve a disproportionately large share of uninsured New Yorkers, but it did so in a high-quality and cost efficient manner. For instance, HHC has been groundbreaking in their methods for treating heart disease and diabetes, two of the most common diseases among people with low-incomes. They have also integrated their Electronic Medical Records system to prevent duplication and mistakes in treatment, all the while spending significantly less in administrative costs than New York’s private hospitals.

Meanwhile, many of New York City’s private hospitals funnel low-income patients of color into segregated and inferior care settings, or they refuse to treat them at all until advocates like us campaign for them to be more inclusive.

Given this context, which health care providers seem more worth of government support when times get tough?  We believe the answer is clear: state dollars should bolster providers who are open and accessible to all, and should not shore up institutions that chose to discriminate.  Unfortunately, the decisionmakers up in Albany don’t seem to agree.

One of the more shocking aspects of health care funding in New York State is that the over $1 billion in government charity care funding is not distributed based on whether hospitals actually provide any care for the uninsured.  Instead, New York uses an archaic accounting methodology in which many private hospitals that do not provide a lot of charity care nevertheless get an unfair share of the state’s charity care dollars.  (For more on this troubling reality, please read this helpful report by the Commission on the Public’s Health System (CPHS), a sister advocacy organization.)  The recently enacted health budget does nothing to change this dynamic and, what is more, it actually creates a new supplemental pool of money–$235 million—for private hospitals without asking enough from these hospitals in terms of providing care for low-income patients.  Who loses out in this elaborate shell game?  Public hospitals and the low-income communities of color and immigrants who rely on them. 

As we grapple with the financial crisis, the value of HHC hospitals and clinics cannot be underestimated or ignored. If it is, New Yorkers face devastating repercussions by way of overcrowded emergency rooms, increased hospital costs, and even fewer services for the already neglected immigrant and uninsured population. HHC services are valuable and effective—they are services the State might claim it cannot afford to prioritize but ones the people certainly cannot afford to lose.

In Victory for Low-Income New Yorkers, NYU Child Study Center Opens Door to Medicaid Patients

Below is a press release we just issued, announcing a major campaign victory!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

After advocacy groups’ campaign on behalf of parents of kids with special needs, NYU designates providers who will accept Medicaid and,Child Health Plus

New York, NY, June 1, 2010 – New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI), a civil rights law firm whose practice includes health justice and disability rights, along with co-counsel, Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP and LatinoJustice/PRLDEF, announced today that they successfully campaigned for the Child Study Center of the New York University Medical Center to designate certain doctors who will accept Medicaid and other health insurance. Previously, NYU’s Child Study Center had a cash-only policy for patients, which meant that they did not accept any insurance at all.

As part of the advocacy campaign, which included threats of litigation, a group of parents represented by NYLPI and co-counsel met with NYU leadership and explained how the cash only policy impacted them and the thousands of other families who were unable to access the Center’s state-of-the-art evaluations and medical services for children with disabilities. These services are in extremely short supply across New York City, and without access to the facility at NYU’s Child Study Center, many low-income and minority children were unable to obtain the medical attention they needed.

“NYU has taken a step in the right direction towards eradicating a few of the many institutional barriers keeping low-income New Yorkers from accessing quality health care,” said Nisha Agarwal, director of NYLPI’s Health Justice program. “We still have a long way to go to ensure that all children, regardless of their financial circumstance or background, have equal access to high-quality mental and behavioral health services, but this is one step forward.”

As a result of NYLPI’s action, the Child Study Center has announced that it will designate certain providers who will begin accepting fee-for-service Medicaid and Child Health Plus. Before this change, children and their parents who could not afford to pay cash for evaluations and medical services often went without necessary and recommended medical treatment for serious illnesses.

According to Lorraine Ali, “No mother wants to be told she can’t provide her child with the medical attention he needs. Now I can finally get my son to a doctor who can treat him. It’s the best news we’ve gotten in a long time.”

Although NYU’s Child Study Center has agreed to take the important step of accepting fee-for-service Medicaid and Child Health Plus, it does not have plans to accept any Medicaid managed care plans.  “There continues to be an acute shortage of evaluative and medical services for children with psychiatric disabilities in New York City,” said Kelly McAnnany, director of the Opportunity & Access Program at NYLPI.  “We will continue to work with providers and with state agencies to open the doors to quality health care and educational opportunity for low-income children with disabilities.”

Reading Between the Lines: Kids of Color & Mental Health Care

This post, by Health Justice Director, Nisha Agarwal, originally appeared on the Race-Talk.org blog of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race & Ethnicity and in the Huffington Post.

This weekend the New York Times reported on a new study which finds that kids on Medicaid are four times more likely to be prescribed antipsychotic drugs than their privately insured counterparts, and often for conditions for which the drugs are not FDA approved such as A.D.H.D. and conduct disorders. These drugs may not only have significant psychological impacts on the children who take them, but they also cause long-term physical harm. This is terrible no matter what, of course, but let us be very clear about what we are talking about here. In places like New York City, where African-Americans and Latinos are 3.5 times more likely to be on Medicaid than whites, the kids we are talking about are black and brown.

The children who are being systematically over-medicated and denied high quality mental and behavioral health services are disproportionately young people of color. What we are talking about, then, is race even if all but the most oblique reference to it has been scrubbed from the lines of the mainstream media coverage.

Let us also be clear about how this may be happening. The Times piece implies that certain problems with the Medicaid program, such as low reimbursement rates for therapy, contribute to the over-medication of children by creating incentives for doctors to prescribe antipsychotics or by reducing the availability of psychiatrists who accept Medicaid, thus funneling low-income kids to non-specialists who are more likely to provide treatment through drugs. This may very well be true, but let us unpack these dynamics as well from the racial justice tip.

In New York City, where I work, there are large, well-respected institutions providing high quality mental health services for children that refuse to accept Medicaid patients ostensibly because they don’t pay that well. This can be viewed as a rational dollars-and-cents reaction to an inadequate Medicaid system, but when you consider the close relationship between insurance and race, it starts to look like a modern version of Whites Only. Such policies become all the more difficult to swallow when you compare them to the approach of some community-based health care providers that also exist in the city and manage to make mental health services available effectively and equitably.

The directors of clinical services at these community health centers will tell you about how they’ve figured out their administrative and billing infrastructure so they can work around some of Medicaid’s challenges to provide high quality mental health care to all patients, regardless of their insurance. Providers like these fight alongside consumer advocates to preserve Medicaid and make it better because they recognize how critical it is to the lives of their patients. They don’t retreat from the system or take shortcuts, hoping that poor kids of color and their mental health problems will just go somewhere else. Indeed, they bear responsibility for their colleagues at other institutions, who disguise their discrimination in the form of a “rational” economic calculus.

You can expect to hear more about the doping of America’s children in the coming year, as more studies are released and blue-ribbon policy panels convened to address the problem. What you probably won’t see are many efforts to write race into the story or the solution. That is our job as racial justice advocates: to read between the lines and move in from the margins.