Katie Kerwin McCrimmon Colorados health exchange board approved administrative fees of 1.4 percent on insurance plans that will be passed on to customers to help fund the exchange. If Colorado lawmakers do not back a proposed measure that aims to divert cash from Colorados high-risk health insurance fund Cover Colorado to the exchange to help cover their costs, those fees could rise to an estimated 3.4 percent. Cover Colorado will no longer exist because the federal Affordable Care Act requires commercial health insurance companies to accept all customers, including those with serious health problems and pre-existing conditions. The high-risk pool…
Category: Featured - Part 10
By Kevin Vaughan and Burt Hubbard I-News Network During the 12-year span between the mass shootings at Columbine and Aurora, Coloradans used guns to kill themselves about four times more frequently than they used them to kill each other, an I-News analysis of death certificates found. The analysis, which covered the years 2000 through 2011, also found that white residents disproportionately committed suicides with guns while minorities were disproportionately victims of homicide shootings. In the wake of the July 20 attack at the Century Aurora 16, which left 12 people dead and more than 50 injured, state legislators introduced a…
By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon Colorado lawmakers plan to introduce legislation by next week to make it harder for people with mental illnesses to buy guns. The legislation, which does not yet have a bill number, marks the last of several measures that Democrats are sponsoring this year to try and curb gun violence in the wake of the Aurora theater shootings and the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The other bills include measures to limit magazines to 15 rounds, require background checks on all gun transactions, limit guns on campuses and require gun buyers to pay for their own…
By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon No doubt you have heard the recent news that the Mediterranean diet can improve your health and save lives. The results published in the New England Journal of Medicinewere so striking that the researchers ended their study early. They concluded that the only ethical choice was to encourage all study participants to eat a diet rich in olive oil, nuts, beans, fish, fruits, vegetables and plenty of wine. New York Times foodie Mark Bittman summed up the findings with a simple prescription: Eat like a Greek. When I read Bittmans advice, I wanted to know more….
By Mary Winter Mass shootings in Colorado, Connecticut and, most recently, in Southern California, where police say an ex-cop gunned down four people, raise questions we cant begin to answer: Did the shooters give warning signs we failed to spot? What caused them to snap? Could earlier mental health interventions or tougher gun laws have prevented the tragedies? And finally: When do we need to lock up mentally ill individuals for our own protection? The subject of forced hospitalization of potentially dangerous mentally ill people known as involuntary commitment has gained currency in the immediate aftermath of the killings. Had…
By Diane Carman The debate over whats to blame for gun violence easy access to guns or lack of access to mental health care ensued in earnest Tuesday night, with intense partisans from both sides in the audience erupting in applause frequently throughout a forum in Denver. Its unlikely that many minds were changed by the time the 90-minute standoff ended in what appeared to be a draw. But the debate highlighted the heated controversy that is being played out across the country as states and the federal government consider gun control bills and mental health care measures in the…
By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon Sen. Irene Aguilar, D-Denver, plans to introduce a bill on Friday seeking universal health care in Colorado. Under her plan, employers would pay a 6 percent payroll tax for each worker while employees would pay a 3 percent share. Self-employed people and investors would pay a 9 percent tax on income and capital gains. In exchange for those costs, all Coloradans who have lived in the state for at least one year by the beginning of 2016 would become part of a statewide health care co-op and would get platinum-level health plans, the most generous package…
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…