By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon Once certain that he would die young, the man born with the deadly disease now dreams of growing old. Im going to be a grandfather someday. Im going to have a really long life, says Bill Elder, a 25-year-old Stanford graduate who is now applying for medical school. Thats because of a blue pill and a new trend in drug development called venture philanthropy. Elder has cystic fibrosis (CF). Its known as an orphan disease because so few people have it only about 30,000 in the U.S. and about 70,000 worldwide so there is little incentive…
Category: Featured - Part 15
By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon KEYSTONE Afghanistan combat veteran, gun owner and bestselling author Wes Moore said its a travesty that its easier to get a gun than health care in the U.S. Accused Aurora movie theater killer James Holmes now faces 142 criminal charges including a sentence-enhancing count for unlawful use of a firearm during the commission of a crime. Moore told an audience of health experts at the 2012 Colorado Health Symposium here last week that we must mourn those who lost their lives in Aurora, but its also crucial for policymakers to discuss tighter gun regulations. If not…
By Diane Carman While political leaders across the country furiously debate how or even whether to provide health care coverage for the uninsured, Denver Health, the states largest safety net provider, welcomed a new CEO this week. Arthur A. Gonzalez will be charged with running a critical institution where 42 percent of its patients are uninsured at a time when state revenue projections are weak and the future of Medicaid expansion is in serious doubt. He succeeds Dr. Patricia Gabow, who is retiring in September after serving as CEO of Denver Health for 20 years. He will begin the new…
By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon AURORA The Colorado community devastated by a mass killing will now become one of only four sites selected for the most promising revolution in health care: hotspotting. The movement began with a different senseless shooting in 2001 in Camden, N.J., a city that tops the country for both crime and poverty. Its a place filled with urban ruins, where a tree is shooting up through a once-stately Carnegie library, where budget cuts recently forced the layoffs of half the police department and where gunshots frequently pierce the night sky. We also end up with all the…
By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon and Diane Carman Colorado leaders have failed to tackle gun fatalities as a public health threat and gun deaths in Colorado and nine other states now exceed automobile fatalities, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Violence Policy Center. Coloradans are reeling from the Aurora theater massacre, the third mass shooting here since 1999 when Columbine shattered the countrys psyche. Yet Colorados governor told a national television audience on Sunday that he thought there was little that could have been done to prevent the recent killings, and conspicuously absent…
By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon AURORA The sound of police and news helicopters buzzed over the Anschutz Medical Campus on Friday and dogs searched locked-down research buildings as workers at the Rocky Mountain regions premier medical research campus grappled with the reality that the suspected Batman killer had, until last month, been one of their own. James Holmes, 24, had been a student at the University of Colorados graduate program in neurosciences. He had lived just one block west of the leafy campus full of new high-rise buildings and adjacent to two of the leading hospitals in the Denver area, the…
By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon Latinos, who are uninsured at disproportionately high rates in Colorado, could gain the most as health reform takes hold. Thats what happened in Massachusetts, which in 2006 became the first state in the nation to require health coverage for all individuals and to implement a health insurance exchange. Massachusetts health reform law became a model for the Affordable Care Act, which the U.S. Supreme Court last month upheld. A lot of Latinos have low-paying jobs and they dont qualify for Medicaid, said Maria Gonzalez, spokeswoman of Health Care for All Massachusetts, a consumer advocacy group that…
By Mark Wolf Most maladies are unencumbered by shame and stigma. Yet for many men to acknowledge they are uncomfortable with the way theyre feeling maybe down, irritable, unmotivated, fatigued, feeling as if life might not be worth living, and, yes, maybe there are some issues down there requires a leap most men seem hesitant to take. Men are stubborn. We dont want to talk about our feelings. We are very leery and afraid of being labeled sissies, afraid of looking weak, and a lot of those things apply when youre talking about mental health, said Matt Vogl, deputy director…
By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon Burdened with providing $1.5 billion in care for the uninsured a year, Colorado hospitals support an expansion of Medicaid to help reduce health care costs. As of now, the Medicaid expansion is the best solution we know of to get health insurance for the people who need it most, said Julian Kesner, spokesman for the Colorado Hospital Association. Kesner said the associations financial analysts are calculating how much a failure to expand Medicaid would cost hospitals, but he doesnt have an estimate yet. Hospitals cannot turn away uninsured people who show up sick in emergency rooms….
By Charlie Brennan I-News Network One in eight Coloradans likely will have diabetes by 2030, according to new estimates from the Colorado Health Institute, and the epidemic will cost the state an estimated $8.3 billion a year. Its a known, predicted disaster if we do nothing if we just sit back and watch, said Chris Lindley, director of the Prevention Services Division of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. Few Coloradans seem to share Lindleys sense of urgency, however. Polls of the 1,000 Coloradans participating in Gov. John Hickenloopers TBD Colorado initiative have found that proposed remedies for…