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Thursday, October 01, 2009

Domestic violence coverage is, or should be, a major part of the healthcare reform debate.

Again, Health Affairs as the source. This link.

The link allows downloading the fourteen page full item in pdf form. Here is the abstract and citation info, from the link, with a link there to download.

The Dangerous Shortage Of Domestic Violence Services

Radha Iyengar 1* Lindsay Sabik 2
1 Radha Iyengar is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics, London School of Economics.
2 Lindsay Sabik is a graduate student in health policy at Harvard University in Cambridge.

*Corresponding author.

Abstract
Domestic violence is a serious, preventable health problem affecting more than thirty million Americans annually, yet little is known about federally funded service provision. We used the National Census of Domestic Violence Services, an innovative victim-safety focused survey, to count services provided by more than 2,000 programs. During the twenty-four-hour survey period, 48,350 people used these services. The results show substantial unmet demand for services (10 percent of requests) because of resource constraints, particularly in rural, economically disadvantaged, and minority communities. Greater funding of domestic violence programs, particularly housing support, is likely to be a cost-effective public health investment. [>Health Affairs 28, no. 6 (2009): w1052-w1065 (published online 22 September 2009; 10.1377/hlthaff.28.6.w1052)]

Key Words: Consumer Issues, Health Promotion/Disease Prevention, Maternal And Child Health, Public Health


Presumably the GOP is satisfied with the status quo, here as elsewhere.

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Update - Aside from the post and the comments, we live in an imperfect world. This is what the Abuse Statute ought to have prevented. With all the tortured souls out there - us, in a way but certainly more extreme - some of them deserving protection are insufficiently protected while in other cases some mean-hearted bozo can abuse that statute and cheapen it. Misuse of the statute offends the entire world and should not be. But, as both comments indicate, people are imperfect and justice is imperfectly handled, with some trying to make it better and some consciously misusing laws, to make it worse. More important by far, however, is when sad situations we all know should be preventable, are unprevented, and the system fails in a manner as the Strib item reported. That is a far heavier weight on society than any abusive use of the statute could ever be, and we are fortunate if we avoid living in the kind of hell that leads to a murder-suicide between spouses of twenty-two years.

There have to be better ways.