PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Health reform fails the disadvantaged

New study demonstrates that US government health reforms alone are not sufficient to reduce the health care inequality gap

2010-09-09
(Press-News.org) A new study¹ looking at the effects of the 2006 Massachusetts Health Reform on access to care, health status and ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in healthcare, shows that the legislation has led to improvements in insurance coverage as well as a decline in financial barriers to care. However, to date, it has not increased people's access to a personal physician or improved their self-rated health. Neither has it reduced healthcare inequalities between ethnic or income groups.

The research by Jane Zhu from Harvard Medical School and team suggests that health reform is necessary but not sufficient to achieve equity in healthcare. The study is published online in the Journal of General Internal Medicine², published by Springer.

In 2006, Massachusetts passed comprehensive health reform legislation to expand health coverage to all its residents and has achieved near-universal coverage. However, less is known about the effects of the reform on its residents' access to care or health status, or how this legislation has impacted ethnic and socioeconomic disparities.

The authors examined trends from 2006 to 2008 in rates of coverage, financial barriers to care, access to a personal doctor, and self-reported health status for adults in Massachusetts compared with those in other New England states. They also analyzed changes in these measures by ethnicity and income and evaluated whether disparities narrowed during the two-year period. They looked at data for 36,505 Massachusetts and 63,263 other New England states residents.

After accounting for trends in New England generally over the two-year period, Zhu and team found that the Massachusetts Health Reform had led to expanded insurance coverage and reduced financial barriers to healthcare for working age adults. However, these successes were not accompanied by overall improvements in access to a regular physician or in self-reported health; in fact both remained essentially unchanged in both Massachusetts and New England.

Although there were improvements in both coverage and cost barriers in Massachusetts for some disadvantaged groups compared to trends in New England, overall this did not reduce healthcare inequalities between ethnic or socioeconomic groups, largely because of comparable or larger improvements among whites and those on higher incomes.

Zhu and colleagues conclude: "Taken together, these findings suggest that health reform policies should address social determinants of health more broadly if a goal is to advance health equity."

INFORMATION:

Reference
1. Zhu J et al (2010). Massachusetts Health Reform and disparities in coverage, access and health status. Journal of General Internal Medicine. DOI 10.1007/s11606-010-1482-y
2. The Journal of General Internal Medicine is the official journal of the Society of General Internal Medicine.

The full-text article is available to journalists on request.

END



ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Biofeedback for your brain?

2010-09-09
Philadelphia, PA, 9 September, 2010 - There is new evidence that people can learn to control the activity of some brain regions when they get feedback signals provided by functional magnetic resonance brain imaging (fMRI). Dr. Andrea Caria and colleagues used this specialized imaging technique during training sessions in three groups of healthy participants who were asked to assess visual emotional stimuli (negative or neutral pictures). The scientists were interested in the signals generated by the insula, a brain region implicated in emotion regulation. While performing ...

Carnegie Mellon researchers develop method to help computer vision systems decipher outdoor scenes

Carnegie Mellon researchers develop method to help computer vision systems decipher outdoor scenes
2010-09-09
PITTSBURGH—Computer vision systems can struggle to make sense of a single image, but a new method devised by computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University enables computers to gain a deeper understanding of an image by reasoning about the physical constraints of the scene. In much the same way that a child might use a set of toy building blocks to assemble something that looks like a building depicted on the cover of the toy set, the computer would analyze an outdoor scene by using virtual blocks to build a three-dimensional approximation of the image that makes sense ...

High stress hormone levels linked to increased cardiovascular mortality

2010-09-09
Chevy Chase, MD—High levels of the stress hormone cortisol strongly predict cardiovascular death among both persons with and without pre-existing cardiovascular disease according to a new study accepted for publication in The Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM). In stressful situations, the body responds by producing the hormone cortisol. The effects of cortisol are intended to help the body recover from stress and regain a status of homeostasis, however chronically elevated cortisol levels have been associated with cardiovascular ...

Appetite hormones may predict weight regain after dieting

2010-09-09
Chevy Chase, MD—Many people have experienced the frustration that comes with regaining weight that was lost from dieting. According to a new study accepted for publication in The Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM), the levels of appetite hormones in the body prior to dieting may serve as a predictor of weight regain after dieting. "Treating obesity with drugs or dietary programs can be very effective in the short-term, but the long-term success of maintaining the weight lost is usually poor," said Ana Crujeiras, PhD, of Compejo Hospitalario ...

Drug-resistant malaria suggests a health policy change for pregnant women and infants

2010-09-09
September 9, 2010 – Malaria remains a serious global health problem, killing more than one million people per year. Treatment of the mosquito-borne illness relies on antibiotics, and the emergence of drug-resistant malaria is of growing concern. In a report published online today in Genome Research (www.genome.org), scientists analyzed the genomic features of a Peruvian parasite population, identifying the genetic basis for resistance to a common antibiotic and gaining new insights that could improve the efficacy of diagnosis and treatment strategies. The World Health ...

Researchers design more accurate method of determining premature infants' risk of illness

Researchers design more accurate method of determining premature infants risk of illness
2010-09-09
STANFORD, Calif. - Stanford University researchers have developed a revolutionary, non-invasive way of quickly predicting the future health of premature infants, an innovation that could better target specialized medical intervention and reduce health-care costs. "What the PhysiScore does is open a new frontier," said Anna Penn, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the School of Medicine and a neonatologist at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. "The national push toward electronic medical records helped us create a tool to detect patterns not readily ...

Researchers identify genes tied to deadliest ovarian cancers

2010-09-09
Scientists at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center have identified two genes whose mutations appear to be linked to ovarian clear cell carcinoma, one of the most aggressive forms of ovarian cancer. Clear cell carcinoma is generally resistant to standard therapy. In an article published online in the September 8 issue of Science Express, the researchers report that they found an average of 20 mutated genes per each ovarian clear cell cancer studied. Two of the genes were more commonly mutated among the samples: ARID1A, a gene whose product normally suppresses tumors; ...

Study identifies critical 'traffic engineer' of the nervous system

Study identifies critical traffic engineer of the nervous system
2010-09-09
Athens, GA—A new University of Georgia study published in the journal Nature has identified a critical enzyme that keeps traffic flowing in the right direction in the nervous system, and the finding could eventually lead to new treatments for conditions such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. "There was no medical or any other applied science drive for this project; it was purely curiosity about how transport inside cells works," said study co-author Jacek Gaertig, professor in the cellular biology department in the UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. "But ...

Novel sensing mechanism discovered in dendritic cells to increase immune response to HIV

Novel sensing mechanism discovered in dendritic cells to increase immune response to HIV
2010-09-09
New York, NY (September 8, 2010) – Dendritic cells are the grand sentinels of the immune system, standing guard 24/7 to detect foreign invaders such as viruses and bacteria, and bring news of the invasion to other immune cells to marshal an attack. These sentinels, however, nearly always fail to respond adequately to HIV, the virus causing AIDS. Now a team of scientists at NYU Langone Medical Center has discovered a sensor in dendritic cells that recognizes HIV, spurring a more potent immune response by the sentinels to the virus. They report their findings in the September ...

House-sharing with microbes

2010-09-09
Household dust contains up to 1000 different species of microbes, with tens of millions of individual bacterial cells in each gram. And these are just the ones that can be grown in the lab! Dr Helena Rintala, speaking at the Society for General Microbiology's autumn meeting in Nottingham describes how we share our living and working spaces with millions of microbes, not all of whom are bad news. Microbes are a part of our normal environment and can be both beneficial and detrimental to our health. "Exposure to microbes in childhood can prevent the development of allergies. ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Modesty and boastfulness – perception depends on usual performance

Do sweeteners increase your appetite? New evidence from randomised controlled trial says no 

Women with obesity do not need to gain weight during pregnancy, new study suggests

Individuals with multiple sclerosis face substantially greater risk of hospitalisation and death from COVID-19, despite high rates of vaccination

Study shows obesity in childhood associated with a more than doubling of risk of developing multiple sclerosis in early adulthood

Rice Emerging Scholars Program receives $2.5M NSF grant to boost STEM education

Virtual rehabilitation provides benefits for stroke recovery

Generative AI develops potential new drugs for antibiotic-resistant bacteria

Biofuels could help island nations survive a global catastrophe, study suggests

NJIT research team discovering how fluids behave in nanopores with NSF grant

New study shows association of historical housing discrimination and shortfalls in colon cancer treatment

Social media use may help to empower plastic surgery patients

Q&A: How to train AI when you don't have enough data

Wayne State University researchers uncover potential treatment targets for Zika virus-related eye abnormalities

Discovering Van Gogh in the wild: scientists unveil a new gecko species

Small birds spice up the already diverse diet of spotted hyenas in Namibia

Imaging detects transient “hypoxic pockets” in the mouse brain

Dissolved organic matter could be used to track and improve the health of freshwaters

Indoor air quality standards in public buildings would boost health and economy, say international experts

Positive associations between premenstrual disorders and perinatal depression

New imaging method illuminates oxygen's journey in the brain

Researchers discover key gene for toxic alkaloid in barley

New approach to monitoring freshwater quality can identify sources of pollution, and predict their effects

Bidirectional link between premenstrual disorders and perinatal depression

Cell division quality control ‘stopwatch’ uncovered

Vaccine protects cattle from bovine tuberculosis, may eliminate disease

Andrew Siemion to receive the SETI Institute’s 2024 Drake Award

New study shows how the Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus enters our cells

Neoadjuvant chemotherapy proves effective for locally advanced penile squamous cell carcinoma

Study flips treatment paradigm in bilateral Wilms tumor, shows resistance to chemotherapy may point toward favorable outcomes

[Press-News.org] Health reform fails the disadvantaged
New study demonstrates that US government health reforms alone are not sufficient to reduce the health care inequality gap