With the Supreme Court poised to issue its ruling on “Obamacare” any day now, many of us find ourselves wondering whether our nation’s highest court will ...make it MORE difficult for this country to achieve what virtually every other industrialized nation already guarantees as a fundamental human r
Larry Adelman, executive producer of the "Unnatural Causes" documentary series, and Dr. Anthony Iton, senior vice president for healthy communities at the California Endowment, will be joining Bay Area News Group for a live online chat about health inequities.
The discussion will begin at noon today at www.ContraCostaTimes.com/life-expectancy. Please feel free to join us.
This is part of a four-part series on health inequities that we began publishing Sunday.
On Sunday, a four-part series a year in the making runs in the Bay Area News Group. As the science reporter for the chain, I teamed with health reporter Sandy Kleffman to report and write this series.
Bay Area News Group will begin a four part series on health inequities Sunday that will feature ZIP code maps revealing wide disparities in life expectancy, asthma hospitalizations, heart diease and cancer rates.
The project, by reporters Sandy Kleffman and Suzanne Bohan, found striking health differences among ZIP codes just a few miles apart.
Even middle-class neighborhoods are affected, the analysis reveals. Middle-class areas have longer life expectancies than the poorest neighborhoods, but fall years short of life expectancies in the wealthiest areas.
Our children shouldn’t live this way.
They shouldn’t have to play at contaminated abandoned industrial sites because their neighborhoods have no green space. They shouldn’t be at risk of dying before their first birthday because the color or their skin makes getting health care difficult. They shouldn’t go to schools where there is no learning and where their parents’ greatest hope is that they don’t join a gang or get attacked.
Over $1 billion in services are poured into the 13 poorest neighborhoods of Alameda County each year. It is what Anthony Iton calls "services overkill."
Lack of primary care and attention to chronic disease are the real ills of the health care system, panelists said at a seminar on health care reform for California Broadcast Fellows.
Anthony Iton, public health officer for Alameda County, says that 3 out of every 4 health care dollars goes to the treatment of chronic disease. "It is the elephant in the room. If you're not talking about chronic disease, you're not talking about health," he says.
Dr. Anthony Iton was named the senior vice president for health communities at The California Endowment in August 2009. Iton oversees the endowment's 10-year, Building Healthy Communities California Living 2.0 initiative. Prior to joining the endowment, Iton served as director of and health officer for the Alameda County Department of Public Health. He had a state-mandated responsibility to protect the county's health and had authority over all medical care and public health for the county. Previously, Iton was director of health and social services for the city of Stamford, Conn.
