Ignatius Bau, Policy Director
Asian and Pacific Islander American Health Forum
Subcommittee on Health and Environment
Committee on Commerce
United States House of Representatives
May 11, 2000
Thank you for the opportunity to testify this morning in support of H.R. 3250. The Asian and Pacific Islander American Health Forum is a national advocacy organization dedicated to promoting policy, program, and research efforts to improve the health and well-being of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Since our inception in 1986, we have worked together with other communities of color to improve the health status of all Americans. In recent years, we have redoubled our collaborative efforts to find common solutions to the difficult challenges in health facing our communities and the nation as a whole.
Before I comment on the Health Care Fairness Act, I would like to provide a brief overview of our Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. We include many diverse peoples, originating from Palau to Pakistan, from American Samoa to Singapore, from Hong Kong to Hawaii. We come from over fifty countries and speak over a hundred different languages and dialects. We are composed of fifth generation Americans, recent immigrants and refugees, and indigenous peoples of the Pacific. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, we are the fastest growing racial/ethnic population in the U.S., expected to increase nearly 40% from 1990 to this year's census.
We also are an incredibly heterogeneous population. As a group, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have the highest percentage of college graduates but we also have the highest percentage of those who have less than five years of education.
- Behind the images of immigrant success stories, there are indigenous Pacific Islanders and Southeast Asian refugees that continue to face long-term poverty
- Behind the images of dot-com South Asian American millionaires, there are Thai Americans who work long hours under extreme conditions in garment factory sweatshops
- Behind the images of successful Chinese American doctors, there are Korean American grocery store owners who cannot afford any health care
This great heterogeneity also applies in our health status. For example,
- Native Hawaiian men and women have some of the highest rates of lung cancer incidence and death among all Americans
- Southeast Asian women have highest rates of cervical cancer among all Americans but at the same time have the lowest rates of breast and cervical cancer screening
- Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have the highest rates of tuberculosis and Hepatitis B among all Americans
- Nearly one quarter of Asian American and Pacific Islanders do not have health insurance
Our organization was established by Asian American and Pacific Islander providers and advocates who came together to address these and other health disparities among Asian American and Pacific Islander populations. We believe that the elimination of health disparities and the improvement of the health of all Americans has to be a united effort. Therefore, we enthusiastically support the Health Care Fairness Act (H.R. 3250).
Specifically, we support the elevation of the Office of Research on Minority Health at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to a National Center for Research on Minority Health and Health Disparities. We believe that the NIH needs a strong and effective coordinating body to comprehensively plan and implement a health disparities research agenda at the NIH. Moreover, as a member of a population with diverse cultures and languages, we applaud the emphasis on research on the cultural and linguistic aspects of outreach, prevention, and treatment.
We applaud the bill’s focus on collecting more complete race and ethnic information regarding health status. This is one of the top priorities for our Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. For too long, the challenges facing many segments of our Asian American and Pacific Islander communities have been ignored because there is no national or local data to document our needs. Moreover, most of the available data do not fully represent the experiences of the diversity in the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. Without more complete data collection, many Asian American and Pacific Islander communities will not have the tools to highlight and address the challenges that we face in eliminating health disparities.
We also support the bill's support for training curricula and continuing medical education programs to reduce disparities in health care outcomes, including development of curricula for cultural competency in graduate medical education. It is vital that our current and future health care providers are well-equipped to serve all Americans.
Finally, we strongly support the bill's national media campaign, including the use of ethnic media, to inform the public of the programs and activities of Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services. The Office of Civil Rights already has been working constructively with providers and health care institutions to ensure the civil rights of all Americans in health care settings and its efforts would be enhanced with such additional community awareness and outreach.
This is long overdue legislation that will go a long way in ensuring equal access, quality and outcomes in health care for all Americans. We applaud the co-sponsors of this legislation for coming together to address these challenges collectively. We pledge our cooperation in working with this Committee to secure passage of this bill. Thank you
