WDET News
- Health Care Reform & America's First People
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Dec 1, 2009Metro Desk - Link to Audio
American Indian Health and Family ServicesThis week health care reform starts to be debated in the US Senate. While most observers say the bill has an uncertain future… members of America’s First Nations say they want to be included in the debate. WDET’s Rob St. Mary reports.
(click the audio link above to hear the story)
It’s the Tuesday afternoon before Thanksgiving at American Indian Health and Family Services on Detroit’s southwest side. Inside an old church that serves as the clinic’s home… a youth group is enjoying a potluck. A harvest celebration of turkey and all the fix-ins is laid out… as Joe… one of the elders of the Indian community… gives the blessing.
"We come together here tonight to celebrate ourselves and ask the Creator to watch over us and bless us as we make a commitment to ourselves and to each other that we will support each other and do the things that are right, as we have been taught, and that we will learn as we go on in the future."
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The youth group is one of the programs made possible through federal health care funding.
Nickole Fox coordinates the youth group at the clinic.
"Our youth group focuses on alcohol, tobacco and drug prevention. But we are a very well rounded program. We learn about violence prevention, healthy eating, exercise, we do gardening activities, community service, sell at the Eastern Market… we sell vegetables and lots of other things. Culture is integrated into everything that we do."
Fox’s boss is Jerilyn Church… the Executive Director of American Indian Health and Family Services.
"We are a title five funded urban Indian health care center. We provide ambulatory health care, behavior health, dental and youth programming for Native Americans who live in the Detroit Metro area and we are one of 34 clinics across the country."
Church says the clinic serves about three-thousand families a year… with the majority receiving diabetes care, a chronic need in the community.
“About half of our clients see us for their care… insulin, foot checks, managing their diabetes but we also do a great deal of prevention. The other thing that we have seen a strike in upward demand for is behavioral health services.”
Church says behavioral health includes substance abuse and mental health care. She says the rise in need is due to the current economic crisis in the state. Church says more than 65% of Southeast Michigan’s Native community is unemployed or underemployed.
And beyond Michigan, Federal statistics paint a grim picture of health for America’s first people… both on and off the reservation. American Indian youth are twice as likely to commit suicide. Native Americans are more than six-times more likely to die from alcoholism or tuberculosis. And they are three-times more likely to die from diabetes than the national average. Over the past decade, the Native community has struggled to improve these statistics in the face of funding that has stayed relatively stagnant.
Stacy Bohlen is Executive Director of the National Indian Health Board in Washington D.C.
“We are funded at about 45% of need. For example, to show you how that works out in real terms, in the United States, a prisoner in federal prison has an investment that is twice the amount of money per person as we are currently investing in the health care of our indigenous people. I think that’s a pretty startling statistic and makes things very real, very fast. And from that you can understand why the health disparities are so serious as well.”
So, as Congress debates health care reform… Bohlen says the Native American community wants to be part of the discussion. Currently, the House version of the Health Care Reform Bill includes legislation that would improve care for America’s Native people.
“The Indian Health Care Improvement Act offers hope and real solutions to moving away from a time when we are first at being last in health care.”
Bohlen says the act will mean more funding to tackle issues such as youth mental health services and diabetes prevention. It will also allow for modernizations… such as hospice care and home health care for the first time under the Indian health service… which the US government is legally bound to provide to the tribes.
“The treaty obligations that assured health care for Indian people in exchange for hundreds of millions of acres of land, for the sacrifice of our way of life, our culture, being the authors of our futures uninterrupted. The price of that, among other things, was that the Federal government has a responsibility to indigenous people in this country to take care of their health care.”
Right now, Bohlen says the health care improvement act is half-way home. While it is part of the House version of the health care reform bill it has yet to appear on the Senate side.
“Health care of American Indians is not an Indian issue, it’s an American issue. It impacts all of this country. And we gladly reach to mainstream America, to anybody who is willing to help us.”
There have been attempts to pass a reauthorization of American Indian health care in recent years… but they have failed. The hurdle last time was a provision which restricted abortion. This time around, Jerilyn Church says she’s more hopeful than ever that the act will pass. Even so, Church says she understands the contentious nature of the health care reform debate in Washington.
“We’ve had disappointments before and we pick ourselves up and we brush ourselves off and we start again. You can’t stop. You have to keep going. And continue to educate local lawmakers as well as national lawmakers about our presence and about our enormous health disparities that we deal with everyday.”
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So, as the health care debate continues, America’s first people are sending a simple message. Please don’t forget us.
I’m Rob St. Mary – WDET News