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We’re thankful for hospitals that tweet
Giving Thanks: A healthcare leader’s perspective
Cartoon – Be Thankful
Cartoon – Start of Thanksgiving Tradition
Cartoon – Thanksgiving
California healthcare advocates rally against Trump
http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article116320043.html
They backed Obamacare, and they’re not letting it go without a fight.
The federal healthcare overhaul could be one of the first casualties of President-Elect Donald Trump, who has joined the Republicans controlling Congress in vowing to dismantle the law. Since winning the presidency Trump has softened his stance somewhat, speaking favorably about popular provisions that prohibit insurers from turning away people with pre-existing conditions and allow people to stay on their parents’ plans until they turn 26.
Still, Trump’s election has California healthcare advocates on high alert, not to mention the state’s new U.S. senator. California could forfeit billions of federal dollars that support Medi-Cal, the insurance program for poor Californians, and subsidize private insurance purchases. They’re worried about the fate of Medicare, a program that Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, said has “serious problems because of Obamacare” and is “going broke.”
A rally today in Los Angeles offers the latest example of a policy rift between California and Washington, D.C., with elected officials joining healthcare workers and patients for an event billed as a push to “protect our health care.” Among the expected speakers are Senate Health Committee chair Ed Hernandez, D-West Covina, Los Angeles County Health Agency Director Mitch Katz, and California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, whose public denunciations of Trump have become a recurring feature.
BY THE NUMBERS: 13.6 million is the number of Californians enrolled in Medi-Cal as of June 2016, the most recent data available, a net increase of about 800,000 from a year earlier and about double Medi-Cal enrollment a decade ago. The total includes almost 3.4 million people who became eligible for Medi-Cal under the state’s optional Obamacare expansion. The Legislative Analyst’s Office last week reported that Medi-Cal caseload should grow by about 100,000 annually through mid-2021 among families, children and people covered by ACA expansion. Enrollment among senior citizens and people with disabilities will grow by an estimated 50,000.
California Braces For Medi-Cal’s Future Under Trump And The GOP
California Braces For Medi-Cal’s Future Under Trump And The GOP
California grabbed the first opportunity to expand Medicaid and ran with it, helping cut the number of uninsured people in half in a few short years.
Thanks in part to billions of dollars in federal funding, a third of California’s residents — including half its children — are insured by Medi-Cal, the state’s version of Medicaid.
Now, with the election of Donald Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress, the state that bet so heavily on the Medicaid expansion is bracing to see how much of its work will be undone. While no one knows yet exactly what will happen, many policymakers and advocates fear the federal government will end or severely limit funding for the expansion.
“There are no easy cuts in Medi-Cal,” said Stan Rosenstein, a former Medi-Cal administrator. Reduced federal funding “could have a major impact on the uninsurance rate, on the viability of our hospitals, and it could have a very negative impact on the economy.”
Medi-Cal cuts could restrict who is eligible for coverage, slash health care benefits, limit access to doctors and reduce payment rates to medical providers — already among the lowest in the nation, health policy experts and advocates said. Medi-Cal covers a host of services for low-income residents, including maternity care, prescription drugs, long-term care services, mental health treatment and hospital stays.
Laurel Lucia, a health care program manager at the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center, said a well-funded Medicaid program benefits everyone, not just those currently on the program.
“A lot of people are just a layoff away from needing Medicaid,” she said. “The Republican plans for Medicaid threaten to undermine that safety net.”
Why Some States Declined to Expand Medicaid
The vast majority of healthcare organizations and professional groups support Medicaid expansion, the Obamacare initiative to widen eligibility for Medicaid to individuals earning up to 138% of the federal poverty level. To them, the benefits of expansion, such as less bad debt and uncollectible bills, better patient access to services, and an overall healthier patient population, outweigh the additional costs for states to bear after the full federal reimbursement period expires. But a subsequent Supreme Court ruling left the decision to implement Medicaid expansion up to the individual states. To date, 31 states and DC have implemented the expansion, the majority of them launching new Medicaid eligibility guidelines starting in 2014. Why hasn’t it been approved in the other 19? Often it is attributed to the state’s dominant political party, but that alone isn’t a reliable indicator, given that red states like Ohio and North Dakota expanded the program, while others like Maine and Virginia did not. Judging from a review of Definitive Healthcare data, there is another possibility: hospitals in non-expansion states were in a better financial position and so there was less political pressure to widen Medicaid eligibility.
Infectious Diseases Keep Delivering Surprises To The U.S.
Infectious diseases are no longer the major killers in the U.S. that they once were, but they still surprise us.
According to a report published Tuesday in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association, deaths from infectious disease accounted for 5.4 percent of deaths from 1980 to 2014.
That’s a big change from 1900, when infectious diseases like pneumonia, tuberculosis and diarrhea accounted for almost half of all deaths. The historical decline represents great progress in sanitation, antibiotic discovery and vaccination programs, says Heidi Brown, an assistant professor of public health at the University of Arizona and an author of the research letter. “We’ve done phenomenal and amazing things with respect to infectious diseases,” she says.
But if you dig into the data a bit, she says, you can see where new diseases make an appearance, sometimes a deadly and dramatic one. For example, between 1980 and 1995, the number of deaths per 100,000 people from HIV/AIDS rose by an average of more than 85 percent per year. Then when new antiretroviral drugs became available, that rate fell by an average of more than 10 percent annually from 1995 to 2014.
“We went from not understanding [the disease] to being able to do something about it in a relatively short period of time,” says Brown. (To be sure, even with the gains we’ve made, the epidemic is not over.)
