HHS Secretary Talks About LGBT Health Data
From today’s White House press briefing, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius talked about the difficulties of collecting health data about LGBT populations:
Q Madam Secretary, I have a question for you on a different topic. As I’m sure you know, the absence of nationwide data about the LGBT community’s health needs and disparities has been a problem. Organizations want government assistance to address problems. The government assists on data to back up these requests, but the government won’t collect data so the LGBT community remains stymied. It’s public knowledge that groups have been advocating with HHS to address the data collection issue — specific things like including LGBT questions on the National Health Interview Survey and the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. You and the President have been advocates for evidence-based decision-making. What’s the holdup here?
SECRETARY SEBELIUS: Well, actually, it’s a great question, and we fully intend to collect LGBT data. The problem is that it’s never been collected, and what our folks came back to us with is we have to figure out — and we’re working with providers and advocates right now to actually market-test the questions — how to ask questions in a way that they elicit accurate responses, because collecting data that doesn’t give an accurate picture is not very helpful in the first place. And there has been so little attempt, either directly to consumers or to parents or to anybody else, to ask questions about LGBT health issues that we don’t even know how to ask them.
So it is definitely a commitment. We will be adding data questions to the National Health Surveys. And right now we are looking at developing a slew of questions, market-testing them, coming back and making sure we have the right way to solicit the information that we need.
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