CERF s Dan Hamilton, left, and Matthew Fienup.
The Bank for America Charitable Foundation has awarded California Lutheran University’s Center for Economic Research and Forecasting, or CERF, a $250,000 research grant to identify the total economic contribution of Hispanics by U.S. state.
This new data will build on CERF s ongoing work on the national-level Latino Gross Domestic Product Report, with the most recent edition published last September.
“The award from the Bank of America is a great testimony to the high quality of work at CERF, and it enables us to contribute to the commitment the university has made as a Hispanic-Serving Institution,” Gerhard Apfelthaler, dean of the School of Management at the Thousand Oaks university, said in a statement.
Looming eviction crisis may put Californians at increased risk for unmet medical needs
Research published in the peer-reviewed
Journal of General Internal Medicine found that Californians who had moved due to unaffordable housing are significantly more likely to report unmet medical needs compared to people with non-cost-related moves.
Our results suggest efforts may be needed not only to ensure healthcare delivery to people who have had to move because of unaffordable housing, but also to prevent cost-related moves in the first place. Such interventions may be particularly urgent in light of widespread economic hardship during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has raised concerns about a looming eviction crisis that could make an effective response to the pandemic itself even more challenging.
“There’s the isolation and then also the dual terror of how this disease has just torn through nursing homes,” [said] Manuel Eskildsen, a clinical associate professor at the [David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA] who treats older patients. “I think everybody’s scared right now. But it’s even scarier to know you’re in the absolute most vulnerable group and you can’t get away from it.”
“I think that the early action taken by L.A. County as cases began to rise has blunted the magnitude of this tsunami that we experienced. It would have been even worse had some of these measures not been taken early on,” said Dr. Robert Kim-Farley, medical epidemiologist and infectious diseases expert at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, and a former health official with L.A. County. (Kim-Farley was also quoted by Fox News.)
In seeking to lead longer and healthier lives, Americans should consider emulating the nation s Latino population, David Hayes-Bautista, a professor of medicine and director of the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at the Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, told participants at the conference.
Latinos in the United States enjoy longer life expectancies and lower death rates from heart disease, cancer and other causes than non-Hispanic whites, said Hayes-Bautista, citing data from the National Center for Health Statistics.
Hayes-Bautista, who s spent 40 years studying the health and culture of Latinos in the United States, said the group can be considered a model for longer, engaged lives. Latinos in the U.S. enjoy nearly 3 1/2 years of longer life expectancy 81.8 years than non-Hispanic whites, at 78.5 years, he said.