The First Americans are Last in Health Care -- Howard Dean

[Khephra]

A serious health care crisis is gripping a segment of our nation at rates astronomically higher than any other group in America. According to a study conducted in 2003, American Indians and Alaska Natives face a diabetes rate which is 249 percent higher than average, a tuberculosis rate 533 percent higher than average and an alcoholism rate 627 percent higher than average.

And yet as a nation, we spend a little over half as much per person on health care for this group of Americans than we do on the rest of us.

The media often reports on local conflicts over American Indian gaming, but they rarely report on the reality that Native Americans are second-class citizens when it comes to allocating health resources. If any other minority group in America were systematically receiving half the health resources that everyone else in the nation gets, there would be a justifiable cry of racism. What America is doing in the area of Indian health care is plain wrong and this nation is too strong to continue to do this.

Indian Health Service facilities are often substandard and the U.S. Civil Rights Commission has called the systematic under funding of this system a "quiet crisis." Yet, the price tag to bring the Native American population up to equal funding is about what we spend in Iraq in one month.

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