The following error was encountered while trying to retrieve the URL: http://www.tahoebonanza.com/article/20120731/NEWS/120739989/1001&parentprofile=1287

Access Denied.

Access control configuration prevents your request from being allowed at this time. Please contact your service provider if you feel this is incorrect.

Your cache administrator is webmaster.

Generated Sun, 05 Aug 2012 16:31:09 GMT by swsquid01 (squid/3.0.STABLE18)

Excerpt from:

Guest Column: The financial impact of the Affordable Care Act

Cash-strapped California is aggressively moving its poorest residents to managed health care, whether they're seniors, rural residents or people with disabilities.

So, when Gov. Jerry Brown proposed earlier this year to transfer the nearly 900,000 poor children in the Healthy Families insurance program into Medi-Cal, he saw it as another opportunity to reduce costs by expanding dental managed care.

But something happened between then and now, and that something was Sacramento County.

Sacramento County's poorly performing Medi-Cal dental managed care program foiled Brown's plans, legislators say.

"That failure certainly has stopped the expansion of dental managed care," said Assemblyman Richard Pan, a Sacramento Democrat who also is a pediatrician. "Hopefully, we as a state have learned from that failure, and not only on the dental side. Hopefully, we can apply those lessons on the medical side."

Sacramento and Los Angeles are the only two counties with Medi-Cal dental managed care.

Their lackluster performance getting poor children to dentists made legislative leaders balk at adding Healthy Families kids to Medi-Cal dental managed care.

Instead, Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg of Sacramento and Assembly Speaker John A. Prez of Los Angeles negotiated a deal to move Healthy Families kids into the more flexible and potentially more expensive fee-for-service dental care model under Medi-Cal.

"We want to ensure that the challenges in certain counties are addressed before we contemplate a major expansion" of Medi-Cal dental managed care, said John Vigna, a Prez spokesman.

Medi-Cal, the state's version of Medicaid, is a public health insurance program for the lowest-income Californians. Healthy Families covers children in families with incomes too high to qualify for Medi-Cal, up to 250 percent of the federal poverty level.

Read this article:

State heeds county woes

Single-payer health care advocates hold house parties to recruit supporters for their cause

On a recent Wednesday night in Corvallis, a dozen people sit around Nadine Grzeskowiaks living room sipping organic lemonade and munching gluten-free pie while video images flickered on a screen.

But theyre not watching the London Olympics. Theyre viewing a Power Point presentation on Americas health care crisis.

After a series of statistics detailing soaring insurance premiums, worsening health problems and widespread medical bankruptcies, up pops a slide on the benefits of single-payer health care.

Its not a government takeover of private medical care, Grzeskowiak tells the intimate gathering of friends and neighbors. Its simply a rational response to a national emergency.

People in this country dont want anybody to take their freedoms away, she says. The thing is, we actually lost our freedom in this country a long time ago when it comes to health care.

Statewide push

House parties like this one are being organized all over Oregon by reform advocates like Grzeskowiak, a registered nurse whose struggles with undiagnosed celiac disease soured her on a system she believes puts profits before patients.

Why should I look for celiac disease, she said one doctor asked her, when theres no treatment I can bill for?

Grzeskowiak is the vice chair of Mid-Valley Health Care Advocates, one of several regional organizations working under the umbrella of Health Care for All Oregon in a statewide push to declare health care a human right.

The rest is here:

Reform party

Patients beginning to reap benefits of advanced care

More than 60,000 people have visited ORMC's expanded emergency department in the Town of Wallkill during the past 12 months. It's just one of the hospital's services that are remaking health care and supporting businesses in the mid-Hudson.DOMINICK FIORILLE/Times Herald-Record

Published: 2:00 AM - 08/05/12

The new Orange Regional Medical Center has not only changed the face of health care in the region since it opened exactly one year ago today, it's begun to change the region itself.

From the 1,500 new customers per week at the Quick Chek next to the hospital, to the scores of new doctors and nurses who will train, work and raise families here, ORMC means more than a gleaming new intensive care unit for babies, private rooms for all of its patients and a new lease on life for its new partner, Catskill Regional Medical Center in Harris.

"It just changes everything," says David Broder, president of the New York Colleges of Osteopathic Medical Education Consortium, referring to the many new students who will study at the planned new medical college in Middletown, and ultimately practice at ORMC and Catskill.

More than 20,000 inpatients have been treated at ORMC.

It's delivered more than 1,700 babies.

More than 60,000 people have visited its emergency department.

Source: Orange Regional

Read more:

Hospital anchoring dramatic expansion of health services

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama, emboldened by the Supreme Court's affirmation of his health care overhaul, is now embracing the law while campaigning for re-election, just as Republican rival Mitt Romney steps back from it.

Read more:

Obama embraces health care law after Supreme Court ruling while Romney inches away from issue

Goal is to reduce costs, improve outcomes

Ned Helms, director of the New Hampshire Institute for Health Policy and Practice at UNH

While the general public knows little about accountable care organizations, health care policy leaders and the federal government believe they may be one of the keys to transforming the medical and financial dynamics of the country's $2.6 trillion health care system.

"I get frustrated by too much talk about how the Affordable Care Act doesn't deal with health care costs," said Ned Helms, director of the New Hampshire Institute for Health Policy and Practice at the University of New Hampshire. "That's not the case. We have three programs in the state doing innovative work to deliver better care and cut costs. The goal of ACOs is to develop and replicate the best performing systems in this country not in England or France, but here."

In theory, ACOs are systems of health care providers hospitals, primary care doctors, specialists and others that assume accountability for both the costs and the quality outcomes for a defined population. They have been developing slowly over the past decade but Helms believes they are ready to take off locally and nationally.

For example, a $250,000 private foundation grant led to the launch last year of the N.H. Accountable Care Organization Pilot, a five-year project at five sites throughout the state: Exeter Health Resources, Central New Hampshire Health Partnership in Plymouth, Southern New Hampshire Health System in Nashua, Cheshire Medical Center/Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center Keene, and a North Country consortium of Cottage Hospital, Littleton Hospital and Ammonoosuc Community Health Services.

Helms said the pilot program is focused on a multifaceted approach of changing the way health care is delivered and paid for by moving away from the traditional "fee-for-service," which contributes to the most expensive health care system in the world and with quality and quantity outcomes that do not match the money spent.

"Our system for financing and delivering health care is seriously flawed," Helms said. "It is tremendously important and encouraging that these five systems have decided to work together to make a concerted collaborative effort to reform and improve the system."

Wentworth-Douglass Hospital in Dover belongs to another ACO development organization, the Granite Healthcare Network, which also includes Concord Hospital, Elliot Hospital in Manchester, LRGHealthcare in Laconia and Southern New Hampshire Medical Center in Nashua.

Helms says collaboration and cooperation are the keys to maximizing the strengths of each hospital, clinic and health care provider as they share costs, treatments and a focus on overall healthier outcomes.

Read the original here:

Providers group as Accountable Care Organizations

WASHINGTONPresident Barack Obama, emboldened by the Supreme Court's affirmation of his health care overhaul, is now embracing the law while campaigning for re-election, just as Republican rival Mitt Romney steps back from it.

Obama sees a second chance to sell voters on the issue despite deep skepticism about it from many people. Romney is avoiding answering hard questions about how he would tackle health care, and thus missing the chance to energize voters who oppose the law.

Democrats say the president always planned to stress health care if the court upheld the law. A month after the ruling, he and his team are focused on promoting individual parts of the law that have proved more popular than the sum. The campaign is targeting its efforts on important groups of voters, including women and Hispanics, who, Obama aides say, will benefit greatly once the law takes full effect.

Before the decision, Obama did mention the law in campaign events. But the case he made to voters was hardly vigorous, especially considering the amount of time he dedicated to overhaul during his first year in year in office.

The primary focus of his campaign speeches remains the economy, the race's dominant issue. But the Supreme Court's favorable ruling appears to have freed Obama to speak about the health law more passionately and emphatically than before the case was decided.

His campaign also is running a television advertisement in eight of the most contested states that criticizes Romney for opposing mandatory health insurance coverage for contraception; that provision is in Obama's overhaul. A health care-focused Spanish-language ad is running in Nevada, Colorado and Florida.

"The Supreme Court has spoken," Obama told a cheering crowd at a recent fundraiser in New Orleans. "We are going to implement this law."

During an event near Seattle, Obama said passing the law was "the right thing to do" and he highlighted specific parts of the overhaul that his campaign believes resonate well with voters.

"Young people will be able to stay on their parents' plans till they're 26 years old," Obama said. "Women won't be getting charged more than men, and you'll be getting free preventive care. Seniors will see the cost of their prescription drugs go down. If you don't have health insurance we're going to help you get it."

His campaign has been aggressive in selling the health overhaul to women.

Read the rest here:

Obama embraces health care law after court ruling