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Americans Know Surprisingly Little About Their Government
Medicaid and Uninsured Patients Obtain New Patient Appointments Easier at Federally Qualified Health Centers
Better Nursing Resources for Critically Ill Babies Could Improve Health of 7 out of 10 Black Preemies
Wearable Sensors to Detect Firearm Use
Americans Know Surprisingly Little About Their Government
Americans show great uncertainty when it comes to answering basic questions about how their government works, a national survey conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania has found.
The survey of 1,416 adults, released for Constitution Day (September 17) in conjunction with the launch of the Civics Renewal Network, found that:
While little more than a third of respondents (36 percent) could name all three branches of the US government, just as many (35 percent) could not name a single one.
Just over a quarter of Americans (27 percent) know it takes a two-thirds vote of the House and Senate to override a presidential veto.
One in five Americans (21 percent) incorrectly thinks that a 5-4 Supreme Court decision is sent back to Congress for reconsideration.
“Although surveys reflect disapproval of the way Congress, the President and the Supreme Court are conducting their affairs, the Annenberg survey demonstrates that many know surprisingly little about these branches of government,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC). “This survey offers dramatic evidence of the need for more and better civics education.”
To address the problem, APPC and 25 other nonpartisan organizations, including the Library of Congress, the National Constitution Center, the US Courts, the National Archives and the Newseum, announced the launch of the Civics Renewal Network, a unique partnership among some of the nation’s leaders in civics education. The network offers free, high-quality resources for teachers through the one-stop website: www.civicsrenewalnetwork.org
The study also found that more than half of Americans do not know which party controls the House and Senate:
Asked which party has the most members in the House of Representatives, 38 percent said they knew the Republicans are the majority, but 17 percent responded the Democrats and 44 percent reported that they did not know (up from 27 percent who said they did not know in 2011).
Asked which party controls the Senate, 38 percent correctly said the Democrats, 20 percent said the Republicans and 42 percent said they did not know (also up from 27 percent who said they did not know in 2011).
Medicaid and Uninsured Patients Obtain New Patient Appointments Easier at Federally Qualified Health Centers
Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) granted new patient appointments to Medicaid beneficiaries and uninsured patients at higher rates than other primary care practices (non-FQHCs), in addition to charging less for visits, according to results of a new 10-state University of Pennsylvania study published in Medical Care.
Using data from a previous “secret shopper” study conducted in 2012 and 2013, the investigators found that FQHCs—community health clinics that receive federal funding to provide primary care access to underserved populations—granted appointments to 80 percent of callers posing as Medicaid patients, while only 56 percent of callers who reported having Medicaid insurance were able to get an appointment at other types of primary care practices. When callers to the same group of practices volunteered other types of insurance, they were able to schedule appointments in those practices about 80 percent of the time. The study also found that nearly 70 percent of FQHCs provided lower cost ($100 or less) visits to uninsured patients, compared with only 40 percent at the same fee level at the non-FQHC practices studied.
The study, led by a team of physician scientists and public policy researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine and Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, in collaboration with colleagues at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC, utilized trained auditors, posing as patients requesting the first available new patient appointment. The callers were randomized to make 10,904 calls to primary care providers—including 544 calls to FQHCs.
“The higher acceptance rates of Medicaid and uninsured patients seems to indicate that Federally Qualified Health Centers will be an important source of primary care for these underserved populations moving forward, as more patients become insured under the Affordable Care Act,” said lead study author Michael R. Richards, a fellow in the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, noting that the Affordable Care Act includes $11 billion in funding over five years to bolster the capacity of these centers to meet increased demand for primary care services. “This study suggests that FQHCs provide better availability and lower-cost options for these new patients, so it will be important to continue tracking FQHCs’ accommodation of patients from these insurance groups in the early years of health care reform.”
While the study also examined the difference between FQHCs and non-FQHCs in the patients’ wait times until the scheduled visit, researchers found no clear evidence that wait times were longer for the underserved groups at FQHCs that offered appointments more readily.
“It’s encouraging to see that FQHCs are meeting the needs of these individuals in appointment availability, cost and wait times,” said the study’s senior author, Daniel Polsky, executive director of Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. “There are a considerable number of patients who will be seeking primary care for the first time in many years now that they are insured, so it’s crucial that the system is prepared for this increase and FQHCs are a key part of the equation.”
Better Nursing Resources for Critically Ill Babies Could Improve Health of 7 out of 10 Black Preemies
In the first study of its kind about critically ill infants, a University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing investigation shows that an insufficient number of nurses and poor work environments are associated with poorer health of infants born in hospitals that care for disproportionately many black infants. The research was published in the interdisciplinary journal Health Services Research. Lead author Eileen Lake, is the associate director of the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research at Penn Nursing.
“This novel study documents that black infants get their care in hospitals that have poorer nursing resources. Fewer infants in these hospitals receive breast milk, which the Surgeon General recommends for all infants. More infants get life-threatening infections. These poorer outcomes impact growth and health over the life course,” said Dr. Lake.
Dr. Lake’s findings are detailed in her article “Disparities in Perinatal Quality Outcomes for Very Low Birth Weight (VLBW) Infants in Neonatal Intensive Care.” Her research studied more than 8,000 VLBW infants in 98 Vermont Oxford Network member neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) across the country. In the nearly 900 NICUs in the US, 56,000 VLBW infants are born each year, 30 percent of which are black. In the hospitals that serve disproportionately more black infants, infections were 29 percent more frequent and discharge to home without breast milk was 47 percent more frequent.
Her research showed that hospitals treating the majority of critically-ill black infants have more nurse understaffing and work environments that are less supportive of excellent nursing practice. These NICU nursing features accounted for a large fraction of health differences across hospitals. The research concluded that improvements in nurse staffing and environments have potential to improve the quality of care for seven out of ten black VLBW infants, who are born in high-black hospitals in the United States.
“Policymakers who are concerned with health disparities in this country should pay attention to these findings and the importance of nursing in the hospitals where these babies are born. A first step to remedy the inferior nursing resources would be to include nurses in decisions at all levels of the hospital,” said Dr. Lake. “Since seven out of ten black VLBW infants are born in these hospitals, improvements in nursing could reduce disparities in health outcomes for these fragile infants.”
Wearable Sensors to Detect Firearm Use
A study from the University of Pennsylvania demonstrates that wearable sensors could one day transform the correctional system by tracking gun use by community-based offenders, who account for a disproportionate share of fatal and non-fatal shootings.
Currently, detecting and deterring this type of crime can be challenging in the absence of reliable evidence that a particular community-supervised offender illegally used a firearm.
In the study, published this week in the journal PLOS ONE, Charles Loeffler, assistant professor of criminology at Penn, demonstrates the feasibility of using low-cost, wearable inertial sensors to detect firearm usage.
To conduct the study, Dr. Loeffler used sensors similar to those found in fitness trackers to recognize wrist movements and other signals corresponding to firearm use. Research participants included officers from the Penn Police Department, construction workers and individuals engaged in routine daily activities.
The resulting sensor data was used to train a detection algorithm that achieved more than 99 percent accuracy in classifying individual gunshots, demonstrating that firearm use can be reliably distinguished from a range of potentially confusable human activities.
“It turns out that gunshots are highly distinctive events when viewed from the perspective of the human wrist,” Dr. Loeffler said. “The wrist experiences a near instantaneous blast wave that is closely followed by the recoil impulse. The entire event is over in a fraction of a second.
“This wearable sensor technology offers criminal-justice practitioners a potential alternative to existing monitoring systems that were not specifically designed to detect individual firearm usage,” Dr. Loeffler said. “If integrated sensibly into existing community-supervision systems, it could enhance the ability of correctional authorities to deter and or detect firearm use while allowing community-supervised populations to experience less onerous conditions of release.” |
