
IBS Speaker Series: Emily Parker
March 17 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Join in person at IBS 155 or via Zoom, email ibs-contact@colorado.edu for the password.
*Light lunch served at 11:45 a.m.

Title: Geography of the U.S. Health Care Safety Net and Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Mortality
Bio: Emily Parker, Ph.D. joined the Bloustein School as an Assistant Professor in 2023. She was formerly a NIA Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan in the Population Studies Center and received her Ph.D. in Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University. Dr. Parker’s primary research interests are in how public policy and community context matter to the longstanding link between health and poverty. The main areas of her scholarship examine the health care safety net—specifically the Community Health Center program and Medicaid—as well as federal place-based policies, which target areas of concentrated disadvantage. She also studies the demographic connections between family, gender, race/ethnicity, and public policy.
Abstract: Health disparities vary widely across communities in the U.S., in large part due to the fragmented distribution of social safety net programs. This talk will explore the impact of one such policy—the Community Health Center (CHC) program—on racial/ethnic disparities in mortality. Emerging from the 1965 War on Poverty, the CHC program is a key means through which the federal government has attempted to remedy inequities in health by funding clinics in low-income, medically underserved communities. Is this longstanding safety net policy associated with racial/ethnic differences in mortality across places? Through linking administrative data on CHC funding with county-level mortality and demographic data from CDC Wonder, the Census, and other sources from 1990 through 2017, I find that the CHC program is associated with sizable reductions in Hispanic age-adjusted mortality rates but no other groups. This result is robust across a range of model specifications and driven in large part by CHC infrastructure in the regional South as well as in counties with higher levels of foreign-born and uninsured Hispanics. I argue that the legal, structural exclusion of many Hispanics from the U.S. health care system and public programs like Medicaid likely explains the influence of CHCs on reduced Hispanic mortality. The talk will conclude by discussing implications for scholarship on how public policy shapes population health disparities.