Health Care Issues for Adults

This issue focuses on Medicaid benefits and care for minority groups. Some of the articles contained in this issue include: Churning Medicaid Managed Care and Its Effects in Accountability; Full Disclosure of Financial Costs and Options to Patients: The Roles of Race, Age, Health Insurance and Usual Source of Care; Do Medicaid Out-of-Pocket Expenses Thrust Families MORE

This issue addresses topics including: structural violence and racial disparity in HIV transmission; medical debt and consumer credit counseling services; health risk and promotion behaviors in refugee populations; Medicaid participation in Ohio; patterns of hospital-based pediatric care across diverse ethnicities and breast and cervical cancer screening among Mississippi Delta women. This issue also addresses: mammography rescreening MORE

The journal has as its goal the dissemination of information on the health of, and health care for, low income and other medically underserved communities to health care practitioners, policy makers, and community leaders who are in a position to effect meaningful change. Issues dealt with include access to, quality of, and cost of health care MORE

This paper explains how medical providers can most efficiently and effectively document their patients’ impairments in support of SSI or SSDI disability benefit applications. It provides practical, experience-based advice that is grounded in use of the Social Security Administration’s Listing of Impairments. This paper is intended to improve access to Federal disability benefits for eligible persons, MORE

This manual discusses the health care issues affecting people who are homeless. The manual is divided into seven parts. The first contains discussions of twenty-eight communicable diseases and three infections seen frequently among homeless populations. The second discusses survival on the streets, and the conditions that arise from this exposure, such as hypothermia, frostbite and heat MORE

The medical care of homeless individuals and families poses a vexing challenge for traditional health care delivery models. The relentless immediacy of the daily struggle for safe shelter and a warm meal relegates health needs to a distant priority. Common illnesses progress and injuries fester, leading to increased numbers of emergency department visits and acute care MORE

Older individuals living on the streets of our urban cities are a unique sub-group of the homeless population. No studies have been published about these elderly “rough sleepers” who face daunting obstacles to health care while facing a litany of health risks on the streets that are magnified by the physical and mental limitations of advancing MORE

This article discusses the fact that injection drug users (IDUs) are at increased risk for many health problems, including acquisition of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and hepatitis B and C. These risks are compounded by barriers in obtaining legal, sterile syringes and in accessing necessary medical care. In 1999, the authors established the first-ever syringe prescription MORE

This study explored the neuropsychological functioning of 90 homeless men. Numerous biological and psychological factors associated with impaired neurological functioning have been identified as common among the homeless, but there has been relatively little systematic examination of the cognitive functioning of homeless people. There was great variability in their test scores, but the presence of possible MORE

The article examines whether decrements in socioeconomic measures in a poor, substance using population predict changes in health services utilization. The authors analyzed a sample, consisted of 658 “hard drug” (crack, powder cocaine, and heroin) users drawn from Central Harlem in New York City during 1998 and 1999, and was stratified according to operational measures indicating MORE