PI's Weekly Media digest: CDC releases neighborhood data on 500 cities; preemption ramps up; Trump budget cuts lead cleanup; and future of the ACA
The CDC released interactive neighborhood-level data for 500 cities last week, developed as part of CDC and RWJF’s 500 Cities project. Berkeley Media Studies Group observes that, since health data is generally gathered on the state or county level, the project partners hope that the tool will enable local health departments to identify health inequities and target interventions in smaller geographic areas.
AlterNet interviewed our Grassroots Change neighbor Mark Pertschuk about federal and state preemption of local progressive laws, which is accelerating under Trump: “Going back 50 years, 40 years, preemption was something that was just a mechanism for managing the relationships between federal, state and local government. It was really never used as a broad tool for policy change; it was rules of the road. It was not until the 1980s, the late 1980s that the tobacco industry turned state preemption especially into a weapon against a grassroots, health or social change movement. What’s happening today around preemption, both state and potentially federally, is a new phenomenon. It really started six or seven years ago. It has two attributes. One is that now almost every issue that matters to American voters is at risk of being preempted by either the federal or state government or both. The second is, that the real change is that preemption is being used as a blunt instrument to destroy local democracy, and that’s new. To get back to your question, what’s happening now and what’s different. In each of the last four years, the threat of preemption has grown and the number of bills introduced has grown. There has been a lot of pushback, but it has not generally been within the political parties. It’s generally been advocacy groups like Family Values @ Work, for example, or Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights working on local smoke-free ordinances, and dozens of other great organizations. There has been success in stopping preemption, but the pressure has grown.”
Grist brands proposed Trump administration cuts to the EPA as “environmental racism in action”: The White House wants to cut one-quarter of the Environmental Protection Agency’s funding and eliminate 1 in 5 EPA employees, three sources with knowledge of the proposed budget told The Huffington Post. The fiscal year 2018 budget proposes axing funding for a vast array of programs, including those aimed at low-income people, minorities, and indigenous groups. “While this ‘zero out’ strategy would impact nearly every community in the United States, a close examination shows the burden of these cuts will fall hardest on the health of low-income Americans and people of color,” Travis Nichols, a spokesman for Greenpeace USA, said in a statement. “This is environmental racism in action.”
Trump’s budget proposal for the Environmental Protection Agency would cut state grants for lead cleanup by 30% to $9.8 million, despite growing awareness of the lingering threat of lead to public health in the wake of Flint and other cities’ struggles to get lead out of drinking water and soil.
The World Health Organization named the 12 antibiotic-resistant bacteria that pose the greatest threat to human health in a new report. The Guardian reports: “If antibiotics lose their effectiveness, key medical procedures – including organ transplantation, caesarean sections, joint replacements and chemotherapy – could become too dangerous to perform. About 700,000 people around the world die annually due to drug-resistant infections and, if no action is taken, it has been estimated that such infections will kill 10m people a year by 2050.”
A group of environmental health doctoral students at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell are working to map the pathways from working conditions (from physical burden and injury to how much control workers have over the conditions of their employment) and psychosocial stressors (such as discrimination) to “diseases of despair.”
Salon reports on a “deadly pattern”: that states that went newly red in the 2016 elections have experienced a disproportionate surge in workplace fatalities. “More than 4,800 American workers are killed on the job each year. But in states that were carried by Donald Trump, the chances of dying at work are higher than in states that Hillary Clinton won. With a single exception, the states that voted Republican had at least three job-related deaths per 100,000 workers, according to the most recent federal labor statistics for 2015. In all but two states that went Democratic, the workplace death rate was less than three. Two states that Trump won by landslide margins, North Dakota and Wyoming, had the highest fatality rates of 12.5 and 12.0 per 100,000 workers, respectively — more than four times the death rates of most states that went for Clinton. A key factor, experts say, is that red states tend to have a higher percentage of hazardous blue-collar jobs, while the more urbanized blue states have more white-collar and service jobs.”
A new Pew Research Center report finds that fewer than half of violent crimes are reported to the police each year, and less than half of violent crimes that are reported are referred for prosecution. These unsolved violent crimes can result from and fuel further distrust in law enforcement.
In an interview with Fast Company, former Congressman Patrick Kennedy says that stigma is among the greatest obstacles to achieving parity in mental health coverage. While passage of the Affordable Care Act was a significant step toward parity, he said, challenges remain with implementation, among them enforcing requirements with insurance companies. To address this challenge, he started ParityTrack, an online system to report violations of parity rights. He also has launched an organization called Advocates for Opioid Recovery with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and social justice activist Van Jones to provide people with the medications they need to fight opioid addiction.
Eabametoong First Nation in a remote area of northern Ontario is helping community members stop opioid misuse by providing suboxone, a medication that stops withdrawal symptoms--and equally key, support from fellow community members, CBCNews reports.
In an opinion piece in STAT, Risa Lavizzo-Mourey of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Victor Dzau of the National Academy of Medicine highlight the new academy report Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity. “Americans tend to think of health as an individual responsibility,” they write. “That’s true, to a point. But that’s not where responsibility ends. The responsibility for promoting health, and equitable opportunities to achieve it, lies with all of us.”
As part of the 21st Century Cures Act, the Trump administration will be naming the first ever assistant secretary for mental health. The Assistant Secretary of Substance Abuse and Mental Health will direct the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and is expected to elevate federal mental health policy.
Feministing blogged on how bathroom laws contribute to the murder of trans women by normalizing discrimination and violence against trans people.
A new and secret draft of the ACA replacement bill is floating around the Hill. Politico reports, “The House GOP is taking extraordinary measures to guard their proposal after an earlier draft of the bill leaked to the public, placing a single copy in a secret room in the Capitol for Republicans to page through.” Democratic lawmakers are not welcome.
In his first address to Congress, Trump laid out five key measures he wants lawmakers to adopt in replacement legislation for Obamacare. CNBC summarizes that they include access to healthcare for those with preexisting conditions; tax credits for those who buy their own coverage; flexibility in state Medicaid programs; legal reforms to protect doctors and patients from unnecessary costs; and creating a national insurance marketplace.
Lawmakers charged with funding education, labor and health programs are preparing for across the board cuts of $18 to $20 billion under President Donald Trump's budget plan. Earlier in the week, the administration sent guidance to agencies that calls for a $54 billion increase in defense spending and corresponding reductions to most non-security agencies. The labor, health and education programs make up about one-third of all non-defense discretionary spending, so appropriations staff members say they're bracing for the cut Cole estimated, Politico reports.