By Dr. Anthony Vigil None of us is competent to make the decision when to end life. We just dont, and never will, have all the data. Since we cannot see into the mind or the heart, we cannot weigh all the factors that may be going into a patients decision to end life. Patients are not obligated to fully disclose everything. We have no idea what is going on in the concious or unconcious of a person during the last moments. When we artificially bring them to the last moment, we are interfering with that process. In the Netherlands,…
Category: Legislation - Part 10
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 Bob Semro Colorados Health Benefit Exchange is on schedule and heading for a successful startup on Oct. 1, 2013, top officials told lawmakers on Thursday. On that date, Colorado citizens and small businesses (with 50 or fewer employees) will be able to easily compare and shop for affordable health insurance coverage in a brand-new online marketplace. The exchange is a key feature of the Affordable Care Act and is designed to help more Coloradans get insurance. Through the exchange, Coloradans will be able to purchase insurance with the help of federal tax credits. One goal of the exchange is…
By Linda Gorman Gov. John Hickenlooper wants yet another expansion of Colorado Medicaid. This one will cover the more than 86,000 collegestudentsin Colorado that the Census Bureau estimates have incomes below the federal poverty level. It also will cover the unknown number of otherwise healthy single students above the poverty level who have incomes up to $15,414 a year. (Income figures do not include additional subsidies received for things like housing, child care, energy assistance and food.) As the Hickenlooper Administration claims the expansion would enroll an additional 160,000 people, it seems that college students will be its primary beneficiaries….
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 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 Colorados new health exchange will cost an estimated $22 million to $26 million a year starting in 2015, spurring managers to consider advertising, taxes on insurance companies or fees charged to employers and consumers using the exchange to pay for it. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services formally approved Colorados exchange on Monday, making the state one of the first six in the country to approved to open for enrollment next October. Other states that will use a federally-run health exchange will pay fees of about 3.5 percent on the premiums that each person…
By Linda Gorman The federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has radically restructured federal subsidy programs for medical care. For the first time in decades, it makes it reasonable for Colorado to begin mending its structural fiscal imbalance by reversing the excessive growth in the states Medicaid and child health insurance programs. The act makes commercial insurance widely available for both working and nonworking people at all income levels. If it works as advertised, the federally subsidized commercial health coverage offered through the Affordable Care Act health benefits exchange will provide better health coverage for the basically healthy adults…