OpenForum – a blog by the Health and Human Rights community

The president’s 2010 budget for the Indian Health Service, the organization that provides federal health services to American Indians, tops $4 billion. This includes an increase of $454 million. But Kathleen Sebelius, head of the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the IHS, said in a June interview that that’s not enough to provide the agency with what it needs. This was after she called our efforts in American Indian healthcare a “historic failure.”

One day before Sebelius’s interview, another AP piece detailed the shortcomings of the painfully underfunded IHS. Operating with half the necessary funds, some understaffed clinics can’t provide preventive care services, and others can’t handle the high disease rates. Patients recount what they rightly see as subpar care: clinicians dismissing a patient’s pain from advanced frostbite until she threatened suicide; being unable to make appointments; diagnosing a five-year-old who had complained of stomach problems with depression. (After many months, several more clinic visits, and a collapsed lung, she was diagnosed with terminal cancer at a Denver hospital and died weeks later.)

The dismal statistics of American Indian health disparities are well documented (go here, here, here, and here for starters). President Obama cites a couple of the more startling ones on his website, including that men living on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations have the second-lowest life expectancy in the western hemisphere. The health disparities are, as Sebelius says, “unconscionable.” But so are the funding disparities. Read more