Medicaid
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 | January 21, 2013This is the part of President Obama's 2013 inaugural address that resonated with me the most:
We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity. We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit. But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future.
For we remember the lessons of our past, when twilight years were spent in poverty, and parents of a child with a disability had nowhere to turn…
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 | October 31, 2012Things are mostly back to normal in DC today: Schools and government offices are open, trains and buses are running on their usual schedules, and there are few outward signs that Hurricane (or Superstorm) Sandy passed through here less than 48 hours ago. The situation is apparently far worse in New York and New Jersey, where flooding damaged millions of homes and hundreds of miles of subway tunnels. Millions of people from the Carolinas to Maine lost power, and many are still without it. The US death toll has reached 40.
With Election Day less than a week away, Hurricane Sandy reminds us how…
lborkowski | October 5, 2012by Kim Krisberg
In the west Texas city of San Angelo, Planned Parenthood has been serving local women since 1938. It was one of the very first places in Texas to have a family planning clinic.
"We have grandmas bringing their granddaughters in," Carla Holeva, interim CEO of Planned Parenthood of West Texas, told me. "We're very much part of the community."
Today, the San Angelo clinic is preparing for some big, and unfortunate, changes. Last year, Texas lawmakers voted to exclude Planned Parenthood and other organizations affiliated with abortion providers from the state's Women's Health…
lborkowski | August 13, 2012Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s selection of Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) as his running mate this past weekend has provided plenty of fodder for discussions about the role of the US government. Unlike Romney, who has often declined to provide specifics about policies he’d pursue as president, Ryan has been very clear about what he thinks the government should do. As chair of the House Budget Committee, Ryan authored the “Path to Prosperity” budget proposal that the House passed earlier this year.
The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza describe Ryan's evolution as a…
lborkowski | August 9, 2012Millions of people will gain insurance under the Affordable Care Act, but will they be able to get appointments with healthcare providers? Coverage doesn't automatically translate into access, and some newly insured individuals will struggle to find physician practices that will take them on as patients. In particular, states that adopt the (now optional) Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion, which extends eligibility to adults up to 133% of the poverty level, may encounter a severe shortage of providers willing to accept new Medicaid patients. Although Medicaid reimbursement levels vary…
lborkowski | July 2, 2012Joe Paduda at Managed Care Matters has posted the second of two parts in the special edition of Health Wonk Review responding to the Supreme Court's decision on the Affordable Care Act: Part I is here, and Part II is here.
I'm delighted with the Court's decision to uphold the law as a whole, but concerned about its making the Medicaid expansion optional. One Slate article and two posts on the Health Affairs Blog (one of which was included in Part I of the special-edition HWR) are especially helpful in thinking about the Medicaid aspect of the decision:
Darshak Sanghavi explains in Slate that…
mmckenna | June 7, 2010Via ProMED Mail comes a news report that about 2,000 people in 5 states are being sought by health departments so they can be checked for hepatitis B infection. The potential source: the Mission of Mercy Dental Clinic, a free dental-care fair held just about a year ago in Berkeley County in the far north-east corner of West Virginia. The potentially infected include 1,137 people who were treated at the two-day clinic and 826 of the volunteers who worked there, from West Virginia, Washington, D.C., Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Three patients and two volunteers have…
grrlscientist | September 21, 2007tags: health insurance, medicine, Families USA report, medicaid
I haven't had health insurance since the middle of 2004. Since 2004, I have held numerous part-time temporary positions, and I was employed for one full year as a full-time professor of anatomy & physiology at a local university, yet even then, I still wasn't provided any health insurance. Further, I was unable to afford health insurance on the wages I was paid as a full-time "temporary" professor (nevermind that I can barely afford peanut butter and jelly as a PT temp). I am still uninsured, but now I am mostly unemployed…