News - Part 24

Komen flap reverberates with cuts in breast cancer donations

By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon Despite a sea of pink draping Colorado in October, fundraising for Komen breast cancer affiliates is down by as much as 30 percent, a drop that will hit local nonprofits across the state. Employees at Komen affiliates in Colorado risked their jobs in February when they publicly opposed the national move of Susan G. Komen for the Cure to cut funding to Planned Parenthood. The political spat between the two womens health groups erupted after Komen officials withdrew $680,000 from Planned Parenthood, which along with abortions and contraceptives, provides breast cancer screening to the poor. The…

Opinion: Data-driven health care policy goal of CHI

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…

Opinion: Obamacare is working

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,…

Opinion: Comparing the Affordable Care Act and the Massachusetts model

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…

Opinion: Freedom key to Romney’s health care plans

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…

Public housing project a national model for supporting health

By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon The woman is missing most of her teeth, but grins like a 6-year-old at a birthday party. Unsteady on her feet, the 48-year-old homeless woman nonetheless proudly describes the meaning of the famous Emanuel Martinez mural outside Denvers La Alma Recreation Center. The young Chicano man is the future. The Indian is our past, says Gina Marie Crespin, who grew up in the Lincoln Park area and now spends her days in the neighborhood park. The eagle is power, Crespin says, pointing to the center of the mural where the soaring birds wings spread to form…

Opinion: New approaches to paying for health care

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…

Video opinion: Bringing a block back to life

By Gosia Kung People want to walk when neighborhoods are vibrant, when there is something to see and when sidewalks are full of other people and colorful spaces. WalkDenver brought the first Better Block demonstration to Colorado in June. A brief video now showcases the transformation. (Click here to see it.) The project provides great lessons for how the built environment can promote better health. The Better Block Jefferson Park focused on a potentially forgotten commercial district in northwest Denver near Federal Boulevard and West 25th Avenue. Building on the history of the area as an original streetcar suburb, the…

San Luis teens work on classmates’ health

By Rebecca Jones of www.EducationNewsColorado.org Its not like the Sanford School is overrun with drugs and alcohol. Its more like its overrun with nothing to do. The school, in the community of Sanford in rural Conejos County in southeastern Colorado, is many miles from the amenities of larger places and, other than sports, extracurricular activities for its 350 students are limited. Resources for its teachers are limited as well. Its exactly the kind of place where Elaine Belansky, a University of Colorado Denver assistant professor in community and behavior health, could find fertile ground for testing a project designed to…

ER ‘frequent flyers’ need more care, not less

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…