By Dr. Jay Want I do a fair amount of work in payment and delivery system reform in various communities around the country.I have been speaking to physicians about change coming for over a decade.If you have done any of this work, you may have had this common experience: that change is hard and people have to have a really good reason to change the status quo.I admit it sometimes seemed to me that change would never come. But lately I have noticed some of the conversations are different.I have been in a couple of meetings recently where audience physicians…
Monthly Archives: February 2013 - Part 2
By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon Expanding Medicaid to an estimated 275,000 additional people will cost Colorado less than the price of not adding them. That’s the bold prediction from a new study of Medicaid expansion commissioned by the Colorado Health Foundation, which supports expansion, and conducted by seasoned legislative budget analyst Charlie Brown and a team of economists. Brown and his team found that expanding Medicaid would essentially be a stimulus program for Colorado because so many millions of federal dollars would flow into the state to pay for the new patients’ care. Federal taxes will pay 100 percent of the…
By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon Health insurance brokers will get referrals and be able to sell plans to individual and business clients of Colorado’s new health exchange. But they won’t earn money directly from the exchange and won’t have to abide by a strict conflict of interest policy that Colorado’s exchange board passed Monday to govern new “health guides.” Instead, insurance companies will continue to pay commissions to brokers as they currently do. And Colorado’s Division of Insurance will continue to license and monitor brokers. It’s unclear how an estimated 150,000 Colorado exchange customers, many of whom will be low-income people who never…
By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon Expanding Medicaid would cost Colorado about $1 billion over 10 years and add an estimated 240,000 to the state’s Medicaid rolls, including as many as 73,000 people who could switch from private to public health insurance, according to a new cost-benefit analysis from the Colorado Health Institute (CHI). http://www.coloradohealthinstitute.org/ The Colorado Trust commissioned the study. Dr. Ned Calonge, president and CEO of The Trust, urged lawmakers to consider the profound impact that Medicaid expansion could have on the health of Coloradans as they ponder financial costs and benefits. Using other studies as a basis, Calonge estimated that expanding…
By Jeffrey A. Roberts I-News Network When she was 3, Torrie Smith tripped on an uneven sidewalk, fell face down onto some steps and broke four front teeth. An emergency room doctor stopped the bleeding and gave her something for the pain, but Torrie didn’t get to a dentist for six months – her first time ever to a dentist – because her parents didn’t have dental insurance and didn’t have cash to pay for an examination. Now 4, Torrie’s dental problems are so severe she has to go to an operating room, not a dentist’s chair, to have them fixed….
By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon Spend less on health care and much more on preschool. Thats the prescription that an international expert on health disparities gave Thursday in Denver to help reverse inequities that leave low-income racial and ethnic minorities much sicker and facing shorter life expectancies than wealthier whites. Health care should get less (funding) and education should get more, said Dr. Paula Braveman. Early childhood development should get the lions share. Having a strong social safety net would make health indicators look a lot better. Braveman is director of the Center on Social Disparities in Health at the University…