Black, low-income asthma sufferers face barriers to treatment

• It wasn't until the single mother of six and two of her children lay in a hospital emergency room with asthma attacks in 1998 that she got the true diagnosis.
• Only then could she begin to manage her health and the health of her children -- all of whom have asthma.
• "I looked in a phone book and I called the American Lung Association," Duncan said.
• Doctors and health care experts say that a lack of adequate care for people like Duncan, who earns $22,000 a year, drives them to seek expensive care in emergency rooms, raising health care costs for all and wasting increasingly scarce Medicaid dollars.
• Much about fighting asthma and making the best use of limited health care dollars is tied to finding better care for low-income populations, experts say.
• In Michigan, the rate of hospitalizations for asthmatics declined from 15.1 per 10,000 to 10.5 per 10,000 from 1990 to 2001, the most recent statistics available, according to the state Department of Community Health.
• For the same period, the rate among African-Americans increased slightly from 43 per 10,000 to 44.9 per 10,000.
• Across the country, about 71 percent of African-Americans live in counties that violate federal air pollution standards compared with about 58 percent of whites, according to a consortium of environmental groups called the National Campaign Against Dirty Power, which published a study in 2002 called "Air of Injustice."
• In the seven years since she discovered she had the disease, Duncan, who is divorced, has struggled to manage it.
• Duncan has health insurance from working in customer service at Henry Ford Hospital.
• But her co-payments for asthma medication are more than $500 per month -- or $6,000 per year, more than a quarter of her annual salary.
• When it comes to remedies for asthmatics, such as a hypoallergenic mattress or pillows, Duncan says she can't afford them.