As this entry is being written – on June 20th, the last day of the scheduled New York legislative session — advocates for health care reform are converging on the State Capitol in Albany to make a last push for the Legislature to create a pro-consumer health benefits exchange – a marketplace for health insurance — before leaving for the summer.
A vital part of the exchange we want to create is one that plays a role in reducing health care disparities. It’s an unfortunate fact that African-Americans, Hispanics and other groups have poorer health care outcomes than White males. Yet, New York does not have a system in place to comprehensively collect data on the records of health plans and hospitals in addressing disparities and making this data available to the public. And without publicly available data, it’s much harder for policymakers to determine what steps need to be taken and for consumers to make decisions as to which health plans and health care institutions they should select.
Citizen Action of New York, through its research and education affiliate, the Public Policy and Education Fund (PPEF), has now taken the first step in addressing this issue, by drafting legislation (A8278) sponsored by Assemblywoman Crystal Peoples-Stokes to create a comprehensive data collection system that reports health outcomes for health plans and health care institutions by the race, ethnicity, gender, primary language, gender, sexual orientation and disability status of the people they serve beginning in 2012. We believe this is the first comprehensive legislation in the nation to propose the creation of such a system.
Citizen Action and the coalition we help to lead, Health Care for All New York, are pushing that any final exchange legislation include a study to determine what steps need to be taken by the new exchange to address health disparities. And high up on the list of what the study should recommend is a comprehensive data collection system modeled on the PPEF bill.
Click here for a copy of the bill and bill memo.
Click here for a summary as to the need for legislation.