healthcare
lborkowski | May 24, 2013by Kim Krisberg
When it comes to nonviolent drug offenses, systems that favor treatment over incarceration not only produce better health outcomes, they save money, too. It's yet another example of how investing in public health and prevention yields valuable returns on investment.
In a new study published in the June issue of the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH), researchers found that California's Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act, which diverts nonviolent drug offenders from the correctional system and into treatment, saved a little more than $2,300 per offender over a 30-…
lborkowski | May 21, 2013At the Washington Post's Wonkblog, Ezra Klein has put up two posts about healthcare costs that are well worth reading. The first is about Oregon's Medicaid program, which has been the basis for some exciting recent research on how Medicaid coverage affects recipients' lives and is now trying to reduce the growth in healthcare costs by improving community health. The second is an interview with Bill Gates, whose Gates Foundation is trying to reduce global deaths of children under age five. Both pieces address one of today's key healthcare questions: How can we best use finite resources to…
lborkowski | May 3, 2013by Kim Krisberg
On Feb. 13, 2012, Honey Stecken gave birth to her daughter Maren. Everything appeared perfectly fine — she ate and slept and did all the things a baby does. Even after a couple weeks at home in South Fork. Colo., with her newborn little girl, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
About two weeks after Maren's arrival, while Honey was at a children's birthday party for one of her son's friends, she received a call from a doctor she didn't know. He was calling on a Saturday, never a good sign. With an urgent tone in his voice, he asked if Maren was eating well, if she was vomiting…
lborkowski | April 26, 2013by Kim Krisberg
Another day, another study that shows investing in public health interventions can make a serious dent in health care spending.
A new study recently published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that banning smoking in all U.S. subsidized housing could yield cost savings of about $521 million every year. That total includes $341 million in secondhand smoke-related health care expenditures, $108 million in renovation expenses and $72 million in smoking-attributable fire losses. In fact, just prohibiting smoking in public housing alone would result in a savings…
lborkowski | March 29, 2013by Kim Krisberg
In California, a minimum wage worker has to work at least 98 hours in a week to afford a two-bedroom unit at fair market rental prices. In Texas, that worker would have to work between 81 and 97 hours in a week, and in North Carolina it's upward of 80 hours per week. In fact, in no state can minimum wage workers afford a two-bedroom apartment working a standard 40-hour week without spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent — the percentage historically used to determine fair rental prices.
"What we've been witnessing is basically exactly what we've been expecting…
lborkowski | March 18, 2013by Kim Krisberg
When it comes to public health law, it seems the least coercive path may also be the one of least resistance.
In a new study published this month in Health Affairs, researchers found that the public does, indeed, support legal interventions aimed at curbing noncommunicable diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and obesity. However, they're more likely to support interventions that create the conditions that help people make the healthy choice on their own. They're less likely to back laws and regulations perceived as infringing on individual liberties. It's a delicate…
lborkowski | March 8, 2013by Kim Krisberg
In a little less than a month, public health workers and their community partners in Macomb County, Mich., will set up at the local Babies"R"Us store to offer parents a free child car seat check. The Macomb County Health Department has been organizing such car seat checks for years now, knowing that proper child vehicle restraints can truly mean the difference between mild and severe injuries, or between survival and death.
The car seat check is taking place April 4 in observance of the fourth day of this year's National Public Health Week (NPHW) celebration, which officially…
lborkowski | March 6, 2013In the Washington Post, Sandra G. Boodman writes about anger management problems in healthcare:
At a critical point in a complex abdominal operation, a surgeon was handed a device that didn’t work because it had been loaded incorrectly by a surgical technician. Furious that she couldn’t use it, the surgeon slammed it down, accidentally breaking the technician’s finger. “I felt pushed beyond my limits,” recalled the surgeon, who was suspended for two weeks and told to attend an anger management course for doctors.
The 2011 incident illuminates a long-festering problem that many hospitals have…
lborkowski | March 1, 2013by Kim Krisberg
Texas construction workers who've lost their lives on unsafe worksites may be gone, but they certainly haven't been forgotten. Earlier this week, hundreds of Texas workers and their supporters took to the streets to demand legislators do more to stop preventable injury and death on the job. They took their demands and the stories of fallen workers all the way the halls of the state capitol.
Just two days ago, workers from every corner of the Lone Star state made their way to Austin to take part in the Day of the Fallen, a day of action to memorialize construction workers…
lborkowski | February 15, 2013One of the less-noticed provisions of the Affordable Care Act is a requirement that pharmaceutical companies report to the Department of Health and Human Services the gifts and other payments they give to doctors and teaching hospitals -- and that HHS in turn make that information available to the public. (It's sometimes referred to as the "Physician Payment Sunshine Act," after legislation previously introduced in Congress by Senator Chuck Grassley.) Earlier this month, HHS released its final regulations to implement this provision. Beginning August 1, 2013, drug and device companies will…
lborkowski | February 1, 2013by Kim Krisberg
Texas may boast a booming construction sector, but a deeper look reveals an industry fraught with wage theft, payroll fraud, frighteningly lax safety standards, and preventable injury and death. In reality, worker advocates say such conditions are far from the exception — instead, they've become the norm.
Such conditions were chronicled in a new in-depth report released earlier this week. Researchers, who surveyed nearly 1,200 construction workers in Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, Austin and El Paso, found that one in five construction workers experienced a workplace injury…
lborkowski | January 30, 2013In Wonkblog yesterday, Sarah Kliff highlighted an important aspect of immigration reform: Undocumented immigrants who gain legal status will also gain access to the Affordable Care Act’s options for getting health insurance. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the ACA would reduce our nonelderly uninsured by 32 million, but 23 million people would remain without health insurance – and one-third of those people would be undocumented immigrants.
The ACA has two main mechanisms for offering affordable coverage to the uninsured: 1) expansion of Medicaid eligibility to all legal…
lborkowski | January 25, 2013by Kim Krisberg
When it comes to good health, America is far from top dog.
Yes, we may spend the most, we may have some of the most advanced medical technologies and we may produce some of the best doctors. But when it comes to the ultimate measure of a health care system's success — the health of people and populations — it seems we are losing a winnable battle.
"There's hardly anything more consequential than Americans dying earlier and being sicker," Dr. Steven Woolf, chair of the Institute of Medicine's and National Research Council's Panel on Understanding Cross-National Health…
lborkowski | January 17, 2013Over the past few years, the incidence of Clostridium difficile infections has risen in the US, and 14,000 people have died from the persistent diarrhea this bacteria causes. Some patients who haven’t been cured by antibiotics have turned to “fecal transplants” – the introduction of a healthy person’s feces into a patient’s digestive system – with, according to case reports and news stories, great success. Now, the New England Journal of Medicine has published results of a randomized clinical trial of the treatment. Of 16 C. diff sufferers given fecal transplants, 15 were cured
Most of us…
lborkowski | January 14, 2013by Kim Krisberg
Dr. Paul Demers says he frequently finds himself having to make the case for why studying workplace exposures to carcinogens is important. Oftentimes, he says, people believe such occupational dangers are a thing of the past.
"A lot of people are still developing cancer and dying from cancer due to workplace exposures, but only a small fraction of those are compensated, so people may think the magnitude of this problem is small," said Demers, director of the Occupational Cancer Research Centre in Ontario, Canada. "I wanted to have better data."
And in just a few years, he will…
lborkowski | January 7, 2013by Kim Krisberg
It's often noted that immigrants to the United States experience a decline in health after adopting American lifestyle habits. However, a recent study has found that new immigrants might not be arriving in such good health after all.
Published in the December issue of Health Affairs, researchers put this hypothesis to the test: Are immigrants truly in better physical health than native-born Americans and does that reported health advantage erode after living in the U.S. or is it a product of undetected disease that's discovered after immigration? It's not only an interesting…
lborkowski | January 2, 2013While we’re on vacation, we’re re-posting content from earlier last year. This post was originally published on March 6, 2012. The final rule on home health workers has not yet been published.
By Liz Borkowski
Back in December, the Department of Labor’s Wage & Hour Division published a proposed rulethat would extend minimum-wage and overtime pay protections to the home care workers who assist elderly and disabled patients with their daily needs. The Fair Labor Standards Act requires that nonexempt workers be paid minimum wage (currently $7.25 per hour) and 1.5 times their pay for hours…
lborkowski | December 28, 2012In looking back at the year 2012, one of the most momentous occasions was the Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act. Here are a few of our posts on the topic:
Broccoli, Coercion, and Severability: Three days of SCOTUS arguments on the Affordable Care Act: Liz summarized the legal issues the Court was considering: the constitutionality of the law's individual mandate, whether the federal government could force states to expand their Medicaid programs as a condition of continuing to participate in Medicaid, and whether the law as a whole could stand if a single provision were to be…
lborkowski | December 11, 2012Several of my favorite health policy bloggers have explained why raising the Medicare eligibility age is a terrible idea -- in short, it would save the federal government money, but increase spending overall (with states, employers, and existing Medicare beneficiaries all facing higher costs) and create the most hardship for lower-income and minority individuals between age 65 and the higher eligibility age. Seniors have a lot of political clout, though, so I'm sure our elected officials will hear plenty about why raising the Medicare eligibility age is a bad idea. What I'm more worried about…
lborkowski | December 7, 2012by Kim Krisberg
The collective experience of domestic workers — house cleaners, nannies and caregivers — often remains hidden from view. For all practical purposes, they work in regulation-free environments without the benefits of labor, wage and health protections or oversight. There are no HR departments in people's homes.
But a new survey released in November has pulled back the curtain on the conditions and experiences domestic workers face, documenting issues such as wage exploitation, preventable on-the-job injuries and the little — if any — power domestic workers have in improving…