By Polly Anderson Critics of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act call it too radical, too expensive and a threat to high quality medicine. But in truth, federal health reform emphasizes a return to the caring, personalized, evidence-based medicine that is well established at Colorados community health centers. While some are still debating the merits of expanding Colorados Medicaid program to a larger percentage of the poor, Colorado community health centers are not waiting to move forward. A growing pool of evidence tells us that our model is the future, and were preparing for a groundswell in patients, be…
Category: Public Health Issues - Part 20
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 Chris Lindley Most pregnant women across the United States listen to and rely on sound medical advice from their doctors and other health experts when determining how to protect the health of their unborn babies. Dont drink during pregnancy is a message based on evidence that resonates with most expectant mothers and contributes to the health of future generations. The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment would like to reinforce that message with a critique of a recent study that suggests moderate drinking during pregnancy is not harmful to young children. On June 20, a Danish research article…
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 Jim Garcia As the executive director and one of the founders of Clinica Tepeyac, a community health clinic that sees more than its share of uninsured patients, I applaud the Supreme Courts ruling to uphold the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Presidents health care reform law that increases access to care for millions of Americans. Since we opened our doors at Clinica Tepeyac nearly 20 years ago, we committed ourselves to caring for all patients who cross our threshold, the vast majority of whom have no access to health insurance and who are desperately in need of…
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…