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With Congress stalled on health care, blacks still looking within to bridge health disparities DEBORAH BARFIELD BERRY
BIRMINGHAM — In a small room down the hall in the Greater Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church, about two dozen people listened one recent afternoon as Donald Solomon rattled off ailments ravaging AfricanAmerican communities. “We’re a sick crowd … Whatever is wrong in the country, we have it worse. We need to get health into the church,” said Solomon, a founder of Congregations for Public Health and co-author of Body and Soul, a healthy living guide for church leaders. For four days in late July, pastors, deacons and folks running church kitchens and health ministries gathered in the Birmingham church to discuss a range of issues, including health concerns disproportionately affecting African Americans in their congregations and communities. The conference sponsored by the Alabama Baptist State Congress of Christian Education drew hundreds from across the state. It was one of several efforts nationwide aimed at helping close the health gap between blacks and whites. In other places, barbers are checking customer's blood pressures, local corner stores are stocking shelves with fresh produce, and some preachers are even banning fried chicken from Sunday church dinners. African Americans, particularly men, continue to lag behind their white counterparts on a host of health issues, including diabetes, heart disease and HIV. Nowhere is this disparity more true than in the Deep South, where many blacks live and where there’s a long history of discrimination, poor health and insufficient insurance coverage. While the disparity isn’t new, experts say it could get worse. As Congress debates how to
Jeraldine Craig, a minister at Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church in Birmingham, chats with Johnny J. Hollis, Jr., pastor of Mercy Baptist Church in Montgomery, after a training class on health disparities. overhaul the Affordable Care Act, experts, community activists and pastors say African-American men are more likely than any other group to be left behind. Republican alternatives to the ACA considered in the House and Senate have included massive cuts to Medicaid, which experts say would hit black men especially hard. “At a time when we should really be working toward trying to close the disparity … any action that rolls back coverage ... only widens that gap,’’ said Corey Wiggins, state health chair for the Mississippi NAACP and director of the HOPE
Policy Institute, a public policy think tank based in Jackson. “We should be working to strengthen policies that ensure access to care rather than limit care.’’ Black men are more likely than their white counterparts to suffer with chronic conditions like obesity, cancer and diabetes. Black men are less likely to have a regular doctor or health insurance, according to a 2012 report by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which examined the disparity. The report found that 15.7 percent of white men were uninsured, compared with 28.8 percent of black men. Medicaid expansions under the
2010 Affordable Care Act made many more men eligible for coverage, increasing their access to providers and medication, health experts say. Because of that, they will be especially vulnerable if Medicaid expansions are rolled back, said Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League. “Any effort to restrict the expansion of Medicaid will have a detrimental, negative and devastating effect on African Americans, particularly on African-American men,” he said. Morial said health care legislation should also address broader social
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