Publications by authors named "Venkataramani A"

Importance: People with disabilities experience pervasive health disparities driven by adverse social determinants of health, such as unemployment. Section 14(c) of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act has been a controversial policy that allows people with disabilities to be paid below the prevailing minimum wage, but its impact on employment remains unknown despite ongoing national debates about its repeal.

Objective: To estimate whether state-level repeal of Section 14(c) was associated with employment-related outcomes for people with cognitive disability.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Cost-effectiveness analyses are commonly used to inform health care and public health policy decisions. However, standard approaches may systematically disadvantage marginalized groups by incorporating assumptions of persisting health inequities. We examined how competing risks, baseline health care costs, and indirect costs can differentially affect cost-effectiveness analyses for racial and ethnic minority populations.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Importance: The extent to which changes in health sector finances impact economic outcomes among health care workers, especially lower-income workers, is not well known.

Objective: To assess the association between state adoption of the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion-which led to substantial improvements in health care organization finances-and health care workers' annual incomes and benefits, and whether these associations varied across low- and high-wage occupations.

Design, Setting, And Participants: Difference-in-differences analysis to assess differential changes in health care workers' economic outcomes before and after Medicaid expansion among workers in 30 states that expanded Medicaid relative to workers in 16 states that did not, by examining US individuals aged 18 through 65 years employed in the health care industry surveyed in the 2010-2019 American Community Surveys.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Importance: Racial disparities in sleep health may mediate the broader health outcomes of structural racism.

Objective: To assess changes in sleep duration in the Black population after officer-involved killings of unarmed Black people, a cardinal manifestation of structural racism.

Design, Setting, And Participants: Two distinct difference-in-differences analyses examined the changes in sleep duration for the US non-Hispanic Black (hereafter, Black) population before vs after exposure to officer-involved killings of unarmed Black people, using data from adult respondents in the US Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey (BRFSS; 2013, 2014, 2016, and 2018) and the American Time Use Survey (ATUS; 2013-2019) with data on officer-involved killings from the Mapping Police Violence database.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Importance: The US is unique among wealthy countries in its degree of wealth inequality and its poor health outcomes. Wealth is known to be positively associated with longevity, but little is known about whether wealth redistribution might extend longevity.

Objective: To examine the association between wealth and longevity and estimate the changes in longevity that could occur with simulated wealth distributions that were perfectly equal, similar to that observed in Japan (among the most equitable of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD] countries), generated by minimum inheritance proposals, and produced by baby bonds proposals.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

An estimated 17.6% of blue-collar, manufacturing jobs were lost in the United States between 1970 and 2016. These jobs, often union-represented, provided relatively generous pay and benefits, creating a path to the middle class for individuals without a four-year college degree.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Aim: The aim was to compare the efficacy of various herbal disinfectants on irreversible hydrocolloid impressions and to investigate the effectiveness of three herbal disinfectants and a chemical disinfectant against particular pathogens.

Settings And Design: In vitro -a comparative study.

Materials And Methods: The following methodology was followed to achieve the objectives.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Policymakers at both federal and state levels are pushing for work requirements and premiums in Medicaid, with the need to differentiate public opinion on these specific proposals.
  • The study aimed to assess opinions of Kentucky adults on the proposed Medicaid work requirements and premiums through a survey conducted in mid-2019.
  • Results showed a diverse participant demographic, highlighting significant portions of the population enrolled in Medicaid and differing political affiliations, indicating varied perspectives on Medicaid policy among residents.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

All US nursing homes are required to report workplace injury and illness data to the Occupational Safety And Health Administration (OSHA). Nevertheless, the compliance rate for US nursing homes during the period 2016-21 was only 40 percent. We examined whether unionization increases the probability that nursing homes will comply with that requirement.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The use of race measures in clinical prediction models is contentious. We seek to inform the discourse by evaluating the inclusion of race in probabilistic predictions of illness that support clinical decision making. Adopting a static utilitarian framework to formalize social welfare, we show that patients of all races benefit when clinical decisions are jointly guided by patient race and other observable covariates.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

We assessed how many US deaths would have been averted each year, 1933-2021, if US age-specific mortality rates had equaled the average of 21 other wealthy nations. We refer to these excess US deaths as "missing Americans." The United States had lower mortality rates than peer countries in the 1930s-1950s and similar mortality in the 1960s and 1970s.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

We examined children's Medicaid participation during 2019-21 and found that as of March 2021, states newly adopting continuous Medicaid coverage for children during the COVID-19 pandemic experienced a 4.62 percent relative increase in children's Medicaid participation compared to states with previous continuous eligibility policies.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: The federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is the primary income support program for low-income workers in the U.S., but its design may hinder its effectiveness when poor health limits, but does not preclude, work.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: In the United States, caregivers of children and youth with special health care needs (CYSHCN) must navigate complex, inefficient health care and insurance systems to access medical care. We assessed for sociodemographic inequities in time spent coordinating care for CYSHCN and examined the association between time spent coordinating care and forgone medical care.

Methods: This cross-sectional study used data from the 2018-2020 National Survey of Children's Health, which included 102,740 children across all 50 states.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Importance: Gender-affirming surgery is often beneficial for gender-diverse or -dysphoric patients. Access to gender-affirming surgery is often limited through restrictive legislation and insurance policies.

Objective: To investigate the association between California's 2013 implementation of the Insurance Gender Nondiscrimination Act, which prohibits insurers and health plans from limiting benefits based on a patient's sex, gender, gender identity, or gender expression, and utilization of gender-affirming surgery among California residents.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Importance: In the US, Black individuals die younger than White individuals and have less household wealth, a legacy of slavery, ongoing discrimination, and discriminatory public policies. The role of wealth inequality in mediating racial health inequities is unclear.

Objective: To assess the contribution of wealth inequities to the longevity gap that exists between Black and White individuals in the US and to model the potential effects of reparations payments on this gap.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, nursing home residents have accounted for roughly one of every six COVID-19 deaths in the United States. Nursing homes have also been very dangerous places for workers, with more than one million nursing home workers testing positive for COVID-19 as of April 2022. Labor unions may play an important role in improving workplace safety, with potential benefits for both nursing home workers and residents.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: The objective of this study is to assess changes in local economic outcomes before and after rural hospital closures.

Data Sources: Rural hospital closures from January 1, 2005, to December 31, 2018, were obtained from the Sheps Center for Health Services Research. Economic outcomes from this same period were obtained from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureau of Economic Analysis, Quarterly Workforce Indicators, U.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The decline of manufacturing employment is frequently invoked as a key cause of worsening U.S. population health trends, including rising mortality due to "deaths of despair.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF