By Ballard Pritchett Medicaid, not Medicare, is the real Obama-Romney divide. Medicaid is one of the most cost-effective programs by which Americans receive health insurance and is far better than private health insurance at holding down costs. In contrast, millions of people using the health care system without health insurance increases health care costs for everyone in an uncontrolled manner. Covering people under Medicaid and its related health plan, Child Health Insurance Program (CHIP), improves the American health care system and saves money overall. The Affordable Care Act will build upon the success of Medicaid and the health care safety…
Category: Health Care Industry - Part 12
By Bob Semro For most Americans, when it comes to the Affordable Care Act, the proof is in the pudding: Will it make health care more affordable? Will it save me money? Heres a number: $2.1 billion. Thats the amount saved in 2012 by consumers because of two provisions of the ACA, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Thats money in the pocketbook for millions of Americans, and it supports the notion that insurance premiums can be better managed. One provision is the review of insurance rates by states, and the other is medical loss ratio requirements…
By Michele Lueck As the Colorado Health Institute observes its 10th anniversary this year, we are spending a bit of time looking back but much more time thinking about the future of health care in our state. CHI was founded in 2002 to address a gap in sound health policy data and analysis, particularly independent and impartial information. Today, the need for reliable data and research has never been greater as leaders in the public, private and nonprofit sectors work to transform Colorado’s health care system – an increasingly costly system that isn’t working as well as it should for nearly…
By Courtney Law After 2 1/2 years as the law of the land, Obamacare has benefited millions of Americans and will benefit millions more as the law becomes fully implemented. The idea behind the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, is that no Americans should have to go into debt because they need health care. President Obama’s health care law expands access to the care Americans need and lowers its cost. The heart of the law is to hold insurance companies accountable by prohibiting them from cutting off coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. For years,…
By Bob Semro The closest real-world example to the Affordable Care Act is the health reform plan implemented in Massachusetts in 2006. Even though the ACA has a 50-state focus, the plans are very much alike. To get an idea of how the ACA might work, it’s useful to look at the Massachusetts experiment. First, an important distinction: The Massachusetts reform plan is less dependent upon taxes and fees than the ACA. This is largely because federal funding has paid for about 64 percent of the cost of the plan, with the state absorbing 18 percent and hospitals and providers…
By Linda Gorman The Obama Administration’s health law assumes that U.S. health care system problems occur because patients and providers have too much freedom. In contrast, Gov. Romney’s proposed reforms recognize that 70 years of regulatory accretion has compromised the ability of the system to adjust to dramatic demographic, economic and technological change. In short, the problem is too much of the wrong kind of regulation rather than too little. Gov. Romney says that he would increase choice and competition, reduce wasteful spending by equalizing the tax treatment of individually-purchased and employer-provided health plans, and rescue Medicare by replacing the…
By Gena Akers It’s a fact: The decisions you make in your personal life about diet and exercise have a dramatic impact on whether you can get healthy and stay healthy, and what your health care will cost. But beyond these personal health choices, there is broad agreement that one underlying cause of the rise in health care costs is how care is paid for. Currently, health care services are generally sold through the fee-for-service model in which providers are paid a predetermined amount for each discrete service they provide to a patient. Rather than rewarding the quality of care…
By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon Frequent flyers at hospital ERs sought emergency care at least four times a year and accounted for anywhere from 11 to 40 percent of total emergency room visits around the U.S., according to seven new studies unveiled this week at the annual meeting of the American College of Emergency Physicians in Denver. In one of the studies, researchers in San Diego identified a group of super users, each of whom visited an ER 21 or more times in a single year. These patients bounced from hospital to hospital. While they represented just .2 percent of all…
By Mary Winter DENVER Holli Wiseman remembers when nurses were expected to be seen, not heard. In the late 1970s, shortly after shed graduated nursing school and was working at Porter Hospital, Wiseman says a doctor screamed at her: Dont give the patient any information unless the doctor says to! Wisemans faux pas? Shed taken time to explain blood pressure readings to a man in her care. Wiseman laughs at the memory. Today, of course, doctors depend on you to give patients information, says Wiseman, a clinical nurse specialist with the Visiting Nurse Association in Denver. Teaching is a major…
By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon The MacArthur Foundation has honored a Colorado doctor with a $500,000 genius grant for his work to help chronically ill older adults stay well. University of Colorado School of Medicine geriatrician, Dr. Eric Coleman, has won the prestigious MacArthur fellowshipfor creating the concept of low cost transition coaches. The coaches provide relatively simple support to chronically ill older adults and their caregivers for a month after hospitals release the patient. His program is called Care Transitions Intervention. The issue is critically important because hospital readmissions are costing taxpayers an estimated $17.5 billion dollars a year. Studies…