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….
Category: Featured - Part 11
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…
By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon FORT COLLINS Roger Mondragon visited the ER 22 times in two years, but still felt lousy and neglected. It was the only place I knew to go, said Mondragon, 22. When Im in pain, Im stressed. Im frustrated and angry. Developmentally delayed and suffering from several ailments including kidney disease, severe back pain, migraines and respiratory problems, Mondragon used to dial an ambulance whenever his anxiety or pain escalated. In a single month, he says he called an ambulance eight times. Born with a fractured disk and severe asthma, Mondragon spent the first few months of…
By Kevin Vaughan I-News Network Lucero Barrios is Latina and a new mother circumstances that place her squarely in a group of people affected by a shocking reality in Colorado: A Hispanic baby born in this state is 63 percent more likely than a white baby to die in the first year of life. And Latinos arent alone the disparity is even more stark for Colorados African Americans, who experience an infant mortality rate three times that of Caucasians. The gap in theinfant mortality rate is just one measurement by which the states largest groups of ethnic and racial minorities…
By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon Colorados health insurance exchange has morphed from a Travelocity-style self-service website to an online interface with in-person navigators slated to help hundreds of thousands of customers choose from an array of complex health plans. The most vexing questions now are if there will be enough navigators and who will pay them to avoid conflicts of interest. New surveys of potential health exchange clients released Monday found customers want simple TurboTax-style guidance, help from people in their communities whom they trust and side-by-side comparisons of complex health plans. Doubts are surfacing, however, about how exchange managers will…
By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon Citing his own history of addiction and asserting that todays marijuana is not your Woodstock weed, Patrick Kennedy, son of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, launched a new national public health battle against pot legalization in Denver Thursday. The new group is called Project SAM, Smart Approaches to Marijuana. The founders are trying to appeal to both the left and the right with Kennedy attracting progressives and former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum appealing to conservatives and libertarians. The group aims to disseminate the latest research on health impacts of marijuana, to speed access and…
By Mary Winter Many Americans are turning to new meat-like foods made of soy and other plant proteins but with the approximate taste and appearance of traditional chicken, burgers, bacon and ground beef as alternatives to animal flesh. Some do it for environmental and ethical reasons as a protest against factory-farm methods commonly used to raise poultry and livestock, which they consider inhumane. But many are also incorporating the so-called meat analogues into their diets for health reasons. Soy alternatives generally are free of fat and cholesterol or contain low levels of them. Soy products also can provide essential fatty…
By Mary Winter Few foods say good times like a sizzling 16-ounce rib eye. For generations, Americans have celebrated milestones, successes and summer get-togethers with a juicy slab of fat-marbled beef, and for most of us, a trip to a pricey steak house is still an occasion. If that occasional steak were the only red meat we ate, many health experts would be thrilled. But today, Americans consume an average of 74 pounds of red meat (beef, veal, pork and lamb) per person each year much of it in the form of fast-food burgers and processed meats such as bacon,…
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…