By Moe Keller The staff and board of directors of Mental Health America of Colorado (MHAC) send our most profound condolences to those who lost their loved ones in the tragic shooting in Newtown, Conn. No words can justly describe the loss they have suffered. We can never know what was happening in the mind of the young man who committed the shooting in Newtown. What we can and must do is remember that our collective response to atrocities like these defines us. At MHAC we believe the key to keeping our children—and all of us—safe from acts of mass…
Monthly Archives: December 2012
By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon Gov. John Hickenlooper has tipped his hand that he’s likely to push for Medicaid expansion. In documents presented Wednesday to the Legislature’s Joint Budget Committee, the governor’s staff wrote: “we are likely to opt in to the expansion.” The governor insisted that the decision to expand rests solely with his office, a contention that lawmakers challenged. “Whether they can expand without additional legislation from the General Assembly is a little ambiguous,” said Eric Kurtz, a Joint Budget Committee analyst who briefed lawmakers. “I think they’re planning to work with the General Assembly. I think they’re just being cautious about…
By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon Sen. Irene Aguilar, D-Denver, unveiled legislation on Wednesday that would establish universal health care in Colorado. Aguilar designed her bill as an amendment to the Colorado Constitution. That means she would need to get support from two-thirds of members in the state Senate and House along with the governor’s signature. Then, at the soonest, Coloradans would weigh in on the referendum next November. “I want to put something on our ballot in front of our voters. We can try to do it in a different way in Colorado,” Aguilar said. “Here’s the conundrum…when people come to…
By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon Gov. John Hickenlooper is calling for an $18.5 million increase in state funding to strengthen mental health in Colorado with instant mental health updates available for gun background checks, a statewide 24-hour phone crisis hotline, walk-in mental health centers and a new streamlined commitment law to make Colorado communities safer. Acknowledging that emotions are still raw over the mass killing Friday of 20 first-graders and six educators in Connecticut, Hickenlooper said the mental health overhaul which will require legislative approval has been in the works since two days after the Aurora theater shootings last July. Related…
By Diane Carman For organizations and individuals working to address the epidemic of childhood obesity, the biggest challenge is to make it fun. Or at the very least to avoid making it humiliating, frustrating, boring and punitive. We need to bring back creativity. Creativity is crucial to solving the obesity crisis, said Chris Waugh, director and co-founder of the design innovation consultancy IDEO. Waugh spoke Friday at an event called Symposium Unplugged, sponsored by the Colorado Health Foundation. Waugh presented 10 steps to designing effective approaches to solving problems and offered vivid examples of how they have been employed in…
By Sarah Mapes Colorado ranks 38th in the country for kids who see a dentist regularly. One quarter of all Coloradans are children and only about 3 percent of these 1.2 million children have seen a dentist by age 1. Tooth decay is five times more common than asthma and four times more common than early childhood obesity. Research shows that good oral health is critical to a childs long-term success in life. Unfortunately, the data are not promising for Colorado kids. Tooth decay is almost entirely preventable, and yet around half of our Kindergartners suffer from it. Oral health…
Dr. Bill Mandell Colorado ranks among the best in nation when it comes to overall health. However the state has some opportunities for improvement, according to the 23nd annual Americas Health Rankings from United Health Foundation. The report, the longest running of its kind in the country, placed Colorado No. 11 among all 50 states for overall heath, up three spots from last year. Heres a snapshot of how Colorado fared: Colorados Strengths Low prevalence of diabetes and obesity: Colorado has the lowest obesity rate in the U.S. at 20.7 percent of the population with 805,000 obese adults. Colorado also…
By Sara Schmitt It is becoming more difficult for Coloradans to get oral health care. Last Thursday, legislators who attended the Hot Issues in Health Care conference in Colorado Springs, sponsored by the Colorado Health Institute, got a sneak preview of new Colorado Trust report on oral health. Based on findings from the 2011 Colorado Health Access Survey (CHAS), the report, A Growing Problem: Oral Health Coverage, Access and Usage in Colorado, said there are now more than 2 million Coloradans without dental insurance an increase of 17 percent since the 2009 baseline survey. The survey also found that having…
By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon Colorados new health exchange will cost an estimated $22 million to $26 million a year starting in 2015, spurring managers to consider advertising, taxes on insurance companies or fees charged to employers and consumers using the exchange to pay for it. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services formally approved Colorados exchange on Monday, making the state one of the first six in the country to approved to open for enrollment next October. Other states that will use a federally-run health exchange will pay fees of about 3.5 percent on the premiums that each person…