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Quality health care
by William McNary, Co-director, Citizen Action/Illinois, President, USAction
Chicago Tribune, January 11, 2005
President Bush traveled to Illinois last week to talk about medical malpractice lawsuits. He told the audience that this issue was not about tort reform but about ordinary Americans who are suffering at the hands of a flawed system. The real malpractice crisis is not a lawsuit crisis; the real crisis is the children, women and men who have suffered from malpractice. These people are not just numbers on an actuary table, they are not just underwriting statistics and they are not just entries on an insurance profit-and-loss statement. These are real people who have suffered real pain.
If the president cared at all about making health care affordable to average Americans, he would offer real solutions that would have real impact. Instead he has shown his concern by prohibiting Medicare from negotiating for lower drug costs, by increasing Medicare premiums, by doing nothing to curtail the rate of uninsured Americans and now by punishing patients.
These are people who were injured for life--or who lost their lives--because they walked into the wrong doctor's office or were put in the wrong nursing home or were prescribed the wrong drug.
Medical malpractice costs would drop dramatically if Bush was committed to providing quality health care for all. Imagine if his focus shifted from protecting big drug and insurance company profits to ensuring that hospitals and nursing homes were fully staffed, that care was improved so that there were fewer errors, that incompetent doctors were fully disciplined and that insurance companies were made to justify their exorbitant rate increases.
Pataki says budget will include changes to cap program costs and protect local property taxpayers
Newsday, January 6, 2005
ALBANY - After years of clarion calls to reform New York's Medicaid system, Gov. George Pataki yesterday signaled a new commitment to change a program that local officials say is choking taxpayers across the state.
In his State of the State speech, Pataki's brief discussion of Medicaid, nearly 40 minutes into his address, was more expansive and concrete than past vows to overhaul the program.
"For months, we've worked with county executives from across our state on a plan to cap Medicaid costs and give local property taxpayers the relief they deserve," Pataki said.
...But the difficulty that is certain to accompany any changes to Medicaid was already becoming clear. While the nature of his proposed overhaul is yet unknown, Pataki's words were already raising alarms that the cuts would fall on the poor.
"When the governor talks about cutting, if that means cutting benefits, raising out-of-pocket costs, cutting people off the program, that's unacceptable," said Richard Kirsch, executive director of Citizen Action of New York, a statewide public interest group.
RIte Care marks decade of 'tremendous success'
The Providence Journal, December 7, 2004
PROVIDENCE -- When state officials first dreamed up the idea of overhauling health care for low-income families, advocates for the poor were up in arms.
The plan called for enrolling tens of thousands of Medicaid recipients, mostly children and their mothers, in HMOs. That meant "managed care" -- and as far as the advocates were concerned, managed care meant less care.
One of those advocates, Marti Rosenberg, recalls meeting in 1993 with Dr. Barbara A. DeBuono, who was then the director of the state Health Department. DeBuono didn't mince words. "This is going to happen," she told the advocates; they would be wise to stop fighting it and, instead, work to make it better.
Yesterday, 10 years after the experiment known as RIte Care started, Rosenberg joined some 200 political and health-care leaders at the Marriott for a luncheon celebrating the state-run health plan.
Rosenberg, director of Ocean State Action, was there to accept an award for her work on behalf of RIte Care enrollees. And she was there -- like everyone else -- to sing the praises of the program she once fought, which now enrolls 119,000 Rhode Islanders.
"RIte Care has been a tremendous success," Rosenberg said.
No one is disputing that statement. And plenty of numbers are backing it up. At yesterday's luncheon, Rhode Island Kids Count, another advocacy group and the luncheon's sponsor, provided a sampling:
- The percentage of uninsured children in Rhode Island dropped from 10.9 percent in 1995 to 4.8 percent in 2003.
- Emergency-room visits and hospital use have declined more than one-third since RIte Care began.
- The percentage of women who get timely prenatal care increased from 56 percent in 1993 to 72 percent in 2002, the highest rate in the nation.
- Infant mortality among publicly insured infants declined by 36 percent in the 1990s. The decline for publicly insured babies aged 1 month to 12 months was 58 percent. ...
Group tackles health care issue
Plan would cover small businesses, self-employed
Edwardsville Intelligencer, November 20, 2004
Everybody's talking about the high cost of health care, but the Healthy Illinois Campaign is doing something about it.
Representatives of this statewide coalition of community groups, small business, labor unions, health care advocates and consumer organizations brought their ground-breaking health care plan to the Metro East Thursday. If implemented, the plan would make quality, affordable health care accessible to everyone in Illinois.
Brent Adams, policy director of Citizen Action/Illinois, and Lindsey Marcus, campaign director for Illinois for Health Care, met with the Government Action Committee of the Edwardsville-Glen Carbon Chamber of Commerce Thursday morning and later with representatives of the United Congregations of Metro East.
Under the plan, Healthy Illinois would form a pool of small businesses, self-employed people, and individuals who don't have access to employment-based health coverage and gain the leverage of massive group bargaining to negotiate affordable premiums for everyone in the group.
The size of the pool would give the state considerable bargaining power and the insurance risk would be spread across a wide population base. At the same time, Healthy Illinois would be working out new strategies to control costs and improve health care quality. ...
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