Tuesday, November 24, 2015

A Short Holiday Reading List: Latinos And Health Insurance, The Passing Of Rick Cohen, And More

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GrantWatch knows that some of its readers may find themselves with a little downtime later this week, perhaps waiting for the turkey to roast or stuck at the airport. To pass the time, you might check out a few links to philanthropy content—including an animated video—which you may have missed.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

“California Expands Latino Enrollment and Access to Coverage and Care,” by Sandra R. Hernández, president and CEO of California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF), The CHCF Blog, November 19.

Hernández tells us that a good number of California Latinos have been able to sign up for health insurance, thanks to components of the Affordable Care Act: Medi-Cal (California Medicaid) expansion and Covered California, the state’s marketplace.

And, in case you missed it, Gov. Jerry Brown (D) signed into law the Health for All Kids Act, Hernández notes, “which will enable up to 250,000 undocumented children in the state—most of them Latino—to transition into comprehensive Medi-Cal coverage.”

In her opinion, though, much still remains to be done.

She states that Latinos are now 38 percent of the state’s population (and California’s largest ethnic or racial group).

And Medi-Cal will spend more than $90 billion on care for all of its enrollees this year, an amount she calls “prodigious purchasing power.”

Read the post here.

“Who Will Fill Rick Cohen’s Role in Holding Nonprofits Accountable?” by Pablo Eisenberg of the Center for Public and Nonprofit Leadership at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, Chronicle of Philanthropy’s Philanthropy Today e-newsletter, November 20.

In this opinion piece, Eisenberg mourns the passing of well-known reporter and watchdog Rick Cohen who “mounted carefully researched and powerful attacks on the failure of foundations and nonprofits to provide social and economic justice to the poorest Americans.” Cohen “uncovered corruption and malfeasance at major nonprofits and foundations and held the nonprofit world accountable in ways few others have done.”

He was executive director of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy during the years 1999–2006.

Cohen died this week: he collapsed at age sixty-four. Read more about the remarkable career of Rick Cohen, who “worked around the clock.”

“Diarrheal Disease: The Unfinished Agenda,” by Mathuram Santosham of Johns Hopkins University, on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Impatient Optimists blog, November 9. Santosham’s affiliations include professor of international health and pediatrics at Hopkins and chair for the Rotavirus Organization of Technical Allies (ROTA) Council.

Santosham states that child deaths from diarrheal disease are down from 5 million in 1980 to 600,000 today. But, citing the journal BMC Public Health, he says that incidence of illness “has barely decreased at all,” and that is a cause for concern.

Read four things that, according to Santosham, health professionals and others around the world need to do to protect children from this awful disease. Among them is “vaccinate all children against rotavirus, the leading cause of severe and deadly diarrhea.” Only 15 percent of children in GAVI countries (which are the world’s poorest countries) receive the vaccine, he says. But did you know that even in the United States, “rotavirus vaccine coverage must be improved”?

“Public health impact has been dramatic in low- and middle-income countries where rotavirus vaccines have been introduced,” Santosham says.

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And on the lighter side, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) produced and released another animated video. This time, the subject is health status, cost and quality of care, and access to care in the United States, compared with measures in other high-income countries. The video, titled Health of the Healthcare System, contains results from the Peterson-Kaiser Health System Tracker. The sources for the statistics mentioned in the video are conveniently listed on one page (click “View as article”), for those who want more detailed information. Veteran health reporter Julie Rovner, who is now working for the KFF’s Kaiser Health News, serves as narrator of the under-four-minute video. Enjoy it!

By the way, the “tracker” is a project of the KFF and the Peterson Center on Healthcare. The Peter G. Peterson Foundation established that center.



from Health Affairs Blog http://ift.tt/1IeWKor

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