By UIC

Lack of insurance coverage is a major cause of delayed breast cancer screening and treatment among minority women, which could lead to a decrease in a patient’s chance of survival. Nearly half of the disparity in later-stage diagnosis between non-Hispanic white women and black, Hispanic and Asian/Pacific Islander women was mediated by being uninsured or underinsured, according to a new study conducted at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Boston Medical Center/Boston University School of Medicine.
Non-Hispanic white women were insured at a higher rate at the time of diagnosis compared with non-Hispanic black women, American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian/Pacific Islander and Hispanic women, according to the study published in JAMA Oncology. The research was led by Gregory Calip, assistant professor of pharmacy systems, outcomes and policy at the UIC College of Pharmacy, and Dr. Naomi Ko, assistant professor at the Boston University School of Medicine.

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Posted on January 10, 2020

By Jake Johnson/Common Dreams

Ecologists at the University of Sydney are estimating that nearly half a billion animals have been killed in Australia’s unprecedented and catastrophic wildfires, which have sparked a continent-wide crisis and forced tens of thousands of people to flee their homes in desperation.
News Corp Australia reported this week that “there are real concerns entire species of plants and animals have been wiped out by bushfires following revelations almost 500 million animals have died since the crisis began.”
“Ecologists from the University of Sydney now estimate 480 million mammals, birds, and reptiles have been lost since September,” according to News Corp. “That figure is likely to soar following the devastating fires which have ripped through Victoria and the [New South Wales] South Coast over the past couple of days, leaving several people dead or unaccounted for, razing scores of homes and leaving thousands stranded.”

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Posted on January 4, 2020

By Susan Ferriss/Center for Public Integrity

Newly obtained government documents show how the Trump administration’s now-blocked policy to separate all migrant children from parents led social workers to frantically begin tracking thousands of children seized at the southern border and compile reports on cases of trauma.
In June 2018, months after the Trump administration began its so-called “zero tolerance” policy to deter migrants trying to enter the United States, an employee working for the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement described a 5-year-old’s despair at a shelter.
“Minor was separated at the border from his biological mother. Minor was tearful when he arrived and would not speak or engage in conversation with anyone,” the caregiver wrote in a report. This document and others shed light on a social experiment that was both cruel and chaotic.
Reports of traumatized children were forwarded to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which is charged with ensuring that national security policies respect constitutional rights. A Center for Public Integrity and NPR investigation earlier this year found that the office failed to assist children whose suffering was documented in hundreds of similar complaints the office received last year.
The most recent internal documents Public Integrity reviewed add to scathing criticism from the Homeland Security inspector general’s office, which reported on Nov. 25 that it couldn’t verify how many children were separated by the zero tolerance policy, which began gradually in late 2017 and ended in June 2018. Tracking was flawed because U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers didn’t accurately record possible family relationships between adults and 1,233 children detained between October 2017 and mid-February 2019, the inspector general concluded.

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Posted on December 21, 2019

By Elisabeth Rosenthal/Kaiser Health News

Much of what we accept as legal in medical billing would be regarded as fraud in any other sector.
I have been circling around this conclusion for the past five years, as I’ve listened to patients’ stories while covering health care as a journalist and author.
Now, after a summer of firsthand experience – my husband was in a bike crash in July – it’s time to call out this fact head-on.

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Posted on December 19, 2019

By Jenny Gold/Kaiser Health News

Eleven years after Congress passed a law mandating that insurers provide equal access for mental and physical health care, Americans are actually finding it harder to obtain affordable treatment for mental illness and substance abuse issues.
The barriers to parity continue despite a bipartisan consensus that more must be done to confront the nation’s devastating opioid epidemic, rising suicide rates and surging rates of teen depression and anxiety.
A report published in November by Milliman, a risk management and health care consulting company, found that patients were dramatically more likely to resort to out-of-network providers for mental health and substance abuse treatment than for other conditions.
The disparities have grown since Milliman published a similarly grim study two years ago.

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Posted on December 17, 2019

By The Illinois PIRG Education Fund

Illinois received a “C-” for making critical information about how governments are subsidizing business projects with taxpayer dollars readily available to the public online, according to a new report from Illinois PIRG Education Fund and Frontier Group. “Following the Money 2019,” the organization’s tenth evaluation of online government spending transparency, gives 17 states a failing grade, while only four states received a grade of “B” or higher.
Illinois received an “C-” grade because researchers could not find any statewide grants report, nor reporting on whether economic development subsidies are producing the promised benefits, among other scoring criteria.

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Posted on December 12, 2019

By Jessica Corbett/Common Dreams

Internal e-mails reported on Tuesday by the Guardian and MLive reveal that executives at a water company contracted to assess the water system in Flint, Michigan privately expressed concerns that residents “might be at risk of being poisoned by lead in their tap water” months before the city publicly admitted the problem in 2015.
The e-mails, obtained by the watchdog group Corporate Accountability, came to light through a lawsuit filed in the Genesee County Circuit Court by the Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat who took office in January.
The state’s suit accused the company, Veolia, of “professional negligence, negligence, public nuisance, unjust enrichment, and fraud.”
Last month a state judge threw out all but the unjust enrichment claim.

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Posted on December 11, 2019

By Mike Lofgren/Common Dreams

How do the horrific events of Charlottesville, the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, and a similar hate crime in California directly relate to the eye-rolling pronouncements by Devin Nunes, Rudy Giuliani, and other Republicans in defense of President Donald Trump?
The answer can be found in the Republican id, where a toxic brew of conspiracy theory, urban legend, photoshopping and comment-board trollery self-organize into an alternate reality. While this alt-reality has only burst into wider public view during the Trump presidency, like the monstrous space alien exploding out of the bodies of the infected scientists in John Carpenter’s The Thing, I was in a position to observe its germination, more than two decades ago.

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Posted on December 9, 2019

By The National Council for Science and the Environment

Public universities are contributing significantly to America’s understanding of climate change, according to a new analysis by the National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE). The group analyzed the research of 80 public institutions from all 50 states and found that they had produced 10,004 studies on the impacts of climate change on their regions between 2014 and 2018.
The report found a widespread focus on the science of climate impacts, and the regional breakdowns show that public university scientists are investigating locally relevant topics, making their work particularly important to guiding local policy in sectors ranging from agriculture to forestry to medicine.
The 10 universities from the seven states in the Midwest region produced 1,736 studies, with an emphasis on agriculture. Studies covered issues like precipitation and drought, as well as soil and water quality, and this was the only region where “farmers” appear as a topic. Although the Midwest is an agriculture-heavy region, it is also one where urbanization issues appear regularly.

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Posted on December 2, 2019

By Lee McIntyre/The Conversation

While watching the House impeachment hearings, I realized my two decades of research into why people ignore, reject or deny science had a political parallel.
From anti-evolutionists to anti-vaccine advocates, known as “anti-vaxxers,” climate change deniers to Flat Earthers, science deniers all follow a common pattern of faulty reasoning that allows them to reject what they don’t want to believe – and accept what they favor – based on a misunderstanding of how science deals with evidence.
As I’ve been watching the hearings, I’ve noticed that a number of characteristics of this type of reasoning are now being embraced by President Donald Trump and his congressional supporters.

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Posted on November 29, 2019