Healthcare Task Force

Eliminate Health Disparities and Improve Access to Health Care

• Track implementation of the Affordable Care Act and ensure that the law successfully expands access to health care for uninsured and underinsured Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs).

• Continue efforts to make health coverage truly affordable, by providing comprehensive health and mental health benefits, setting subsidies at appropriate levels for both individuals and families, and capping out-of-pocket costs.

• Work to eliminate health disparities in minority communities through support of the Health Equity and Accountability Act.
• Support new criteria for Medically Underserved Areas and Health Provider Shortage Areas and the inclusion of limited English proficiency considerations

• Expand Medicaid eligibility to Compact of Free Association (COFA) Migrants.

• Allow Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) recipients to purchase health insurance coverage through the Health Insurance Marketplace. 

• Support efforts to eliminate the five-year bar of means-tested public benefits, including Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), for lawful permanent residents.

Ensure Culturally Competent and Linguistically Appropriate Care

• Support culturally and linguistically competent outreach, enrollment, and access efforts for the Affordable Care Act in Asian and Pacific Islander languages.

• Support the creation of standards to assess the quality of health interpreters and translators. 

• Support programs and research on diseases and chronic conditions that disproportionally affect AAPIs, including hepatitis B, diabetes, cancer, and obesity.

• Support legislation that bars discrimination in the provision of health care based on primary language.

• Support legislation and efforts to increase the hiring of culturally diverse public health workers, including community health workers, mental health workers and executives.

Improve Data Collection and Health Research

• Promote diversity among reviewers of health research proposals to ensure that the interests of underserved populations are considered in grant making processes.

• Support initiatives to encourage ethnic diversity in clinical trials in order to measure the safety and effectiveness of drugs and therapies in a broad range of individuals.

• Fully fund and implement Section 4302 of the Affordable Care Act that strengthens AAPI data collection.
• Support additional efforts to collect and report disaggregated race/ethnicity and primary language data to identify health disparities among AAPI ethnic subgroups.

• Fully fund provisions in the Affordable Care Act related to the expansion and creation of AAPI initiatives within the Department of Health and Human Services. 

• Support research that improves delivery of effective care to AAPI , especially overcoming language and cultural barriers and ensuring adequate access to quality mental health care

Prioritize Prevention and Public Health

• Support legislation to create a surveillance system to track hepatitis infection; support activities to promote early detection and education; and support research on improved treatments and vaccines.

• Continue to advocate that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) prioritize the prevention and treatment of viral hepatitis and provides strong leadership and sufficient resources to combat the disease.

• Support diabetes prevention and treatment programs to reduce the number of new cases, especially in the elderly, youth, and AAPI demographic groups.
• Support funding for programs that aim to reduce cancer disparities at the CDC, while maintaining funding for cancer research at the National Institute of Health (NIH).

• Support funding for programs under the Minority AIDS Initiative, increase awareness about the growing HIV/AIDS infection rate in the AAPI community, combat stigma, and encourage testing.

• Support funding for the Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health (REACH) program within the CDC.

• Protect funding for the Prevention and Public Health Fund that allow communities to develop effective prevention programs.

• Defend the ACA against efforts to reduce women's access to comprehensive reproductive health services, including but not limited to efforts that would limit private and public insurance coverage of such services.

• Support funding for programs that work to decrease and prevent Cervical Cancer for AAPI communities.

• Support efforts to ban sex-selective abortion bans as stand-alone legislation or as part of other pieces of legislation.

Environmental Justice as a Public Health Issue

• Increase awareness of the unequal health burdens and environmental burdens that contribute to health disparities experienced by AAPIs and other communities of color.