Census Bureau pushes to make sure minorities are counted

For places like the Chicago Family Health Center -- the source of health care for about 23,000 Chicagoans -- roughly half of them African-American, half Hispanic, virtually all of them poor -- the 2010 Census is more than an academic headcount. It will go a long way in determining how much federal money the clinic receives.

"Funding for federally qualified health centers is determined on the number of people living in a community who don't have access to primary health care," says Warren Brodine, the center's chief executive. "So having an accurate census count is critically important to us to be sure that we capture every single person who's eligible for health care services."

Historically, the census has undercounted minorities, especially African-Americans and Hispanics living in big cities. The Census Bureau noted that its 2000 count overcounted 1.3 million people, most of them wealthy whites with multiple residences, while missing about 4.5 million others, mostly blacks and Hispanics.

The census isn't just a quaint Constitutional requirement. These once-every-10-years counts determine whether states gain or lose seats in Congress -- and dictate how at least $478 billion in federal spending on social programs from Medicaid to foster care to vocational education services.

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A special board created by Congress to monitor the 2000 Census estimates that the 2000 undercount is costing 31 states plus the District of Columbia at least $4.1 billion dollars in federal funds between 2002 and 2012 -- $3.7 billion of it in Medicare, the federal program that funds state health care for the needy. The biggest losses were in California, Texas and Georgia.

Even in states that were well-counted overall, urban areas lost money because of high undercount rates. Massachusetts and Illinois, for example, were both well-counted, but both the Boston and Chicago areas were undercounted, costing them tens of millions of dollars in federal aid.

The 2010 count faces new challenges, including people displaced by home foreclosures during the economic crisis and immigrants' distrust of government workers amid the crackdown on illegal immigration.

African-American leaders met in Washington Wednesday with Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, whose department runs the Census Bureau, pressing for as accurate a count as possible.

"The undercount of blacks in the last count and the overcount of whites by one percent is not just a Washington statistic," the Rev. Al Sharpton said after the meeting. "It manifests itself in goods and services that cost us. We want what is ours."

"What happens in this census is going to haunt us or actually benefit us for the next 50 years," said Danny Bakewell, publisher of the LA Sentinel, an African-American-owned weekly newspaper, and president of the National Newspapers Publishers Association.

The groups said they asked Locke to target more efforts in the black community to urge them to fill out and return the census forms.

In a statement, Locke acknowledged that "African-Americans and other minority communities have been consistently undercounted in past censuses" and praised the black leaders "for their commitment to achieving an accurate count."

Next month, the Census Bureau launches a $300 million advertising campaign with about 17 percent of the media buys targeted for black communities.