Serious injuries worse for uninsured, By Henry L. Davis, July 26, 2010, Buffalo News: “Federal law prohibits hospitals from treating uninsured trauma patients any differently than patients with insurance. Yet studies in recent years have exposed a big disparity: Patients who lack insurance are much more likely to die from car accidents, gunshot wounds and other serious injuries than those who arrive at the hospital with coverage. The latest research comes from a University at Buffalo analysis of 191,666 patients, ages 18 to 30, who visited 649 trauma centers from 2001 to 2005 for blunt and penetrating trauma injuries. Blunt trauma includes injuries mainly from motor vehicle accidents, followed by such incidents as falls and assaults, while penetrating trauma consists mainly of gunshot wounds and, to a lesser extent, injuries from stabbings. For blunt trauma, uninsured patients were 1.8 times more likely to die, even after controlling for age, sex, race and severity of injury, according to the researchers, who presented their results recently at the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine annual meeting. If patients lacked insurance, they were 2.6 times more likely to die from penetrating trauma injuries…”
Day: July 26, 2010
High School Dropout Rate – Portland, Oregon
Droupouts in Portland Public Schools are entrenched pattern, By Betsy Hammond, July 25, 2010, The Oregonian: “People in other big-city school districts around the country have a hard time thinking of Portland Public Schools as a truly urban district. Not only is Portland tiny (47,000 students, compared with 700,000 in Los Angeles), but only 43 percent of its students are poor (in Chicago, 85 percent are). A majority are white (in Philadelphia, 13 percent are). What’s more, middle- and upper-income professionals in Portland do something their counterparts in Detroit, L.A. or Washington, D.C., rarely consider: They send their children to central-city public schools. But there is one way in which our small, mostly white, heavily middle-class school system is statistically right in line with some of the grittiest urban districts in the nation: A shockingly low share of Portland’s high school students earn diplomas…”
Summer Meal Programs for Children – Michigan
No vacation from hunger in Metro area, By Catherine Jun, July 26, 2010, Detroit News: “Access to nutritional food becomes dicey in the summer for many impoverished families, who are forced to go without the free or reduced-cost breakfast and lunches they depend on during the school year. Though a federal program serves free lunches in poorer neighborhoods in the summer, it continues to drawn just a small fraction of these families. And as more households fall into poverty, experts say childhood hunger is growing more acute, and agencies, churches and community centers are taking matters into their own hands to fill the hunger gap. ‘We are hearing more and more about kids suffering,’ said Susan Goodell, president and CEO of Forgotten Harvest. The Oak Park-based food rescue agency this summer is using donations to deliver 1,000 brown bag lunches a day to children in Detroit and Pontiac, including the Spring Lake Village Apartments on Carriage Circle. The effort amounts to a 56 percent increase in food distribution this summer over last, Goodell said…”