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Darden Restaurants Cut Workers' Hours to Avoid Paying Health Care Coverage - Video

10-10-2012 00:48 A new mental health bill will soon be presented to the Cabinet for approval. But activists say the bill is only an eyewash. India has the highest suicide rates in the world, said a Lancet study. 10 per cent adult Indians have mental health disorders, according to the World health Organisation and an estimated 1 million Indians are in need of mental health services. 25 years since the mental health act of 1987 came into being, a new Mental Health Care Bill will soon be presented to the Cabinet for approval.But for people like Bhargavi Davar, a mental health patient and an activist herself, the bill definitely has loopholes, at the patient's end. "Robbing all personal rights - treatment, hospital, indefinite stay - laws make the individual more vulnerable," Bhargavi said. With India being home to 30 to 40 million people living with psychosocial disabilities, the bill needs a wider debate before it is adopted.

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Activists question new mental health bill to be proposed - Video

10-10-2012 07:44 GE has been acknowledged by the Chicago Department of Public Health at the halfway point of its two-year, $1.25 million grant program that started in 2011. Five non-profits and many volunteers, supported by the grant from the GE Foundation for the Developing Health Chicago program, have worked to increase access to primary health care for underserved communities. The many accomplishments of the program after a year's work were celebrated in a recent event at the Howard Brown Health Center. The FedEx Healthcare Industry Summit held in New York City focused on "borderless" health care in an interconnected world. Presenters and attendees discussed how the industry, from R&D and manufacturing to caregivers, could develop more and better solutions to meet the changing dynamics of a global healthcare industry. FedEx showcased a portfolio of its new products and service solutions, from innovations in cold chain technologies to temperature-controlled shipping capabilities with increased speed and reach. A new study from researchers at Quest Diagnostic and Pfizer reveals that a laboratory-developed blood test using deep-sequencing technology performed comparably to the industry's current, standard phenotypic test in predicting clinical response to HIV antiretroviral therapy. The study's findings confirm the potential of advanced sequencing technologies to help in cost-effective management of HIV patients. For more information on these and other stories, go to ...

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GE Funds Chicago Healthcare; FedEx Healthcare Summit; Pfizer Quest HIV Tests- Health Min 10/10/12 - Video

For many providers that accept Medicaid, the new privatized program that will manage health care services for the states poor and disabled citizens is full of uncertainty.

Pending various approvals, KanCare will go live on Jan.1, 2013, replacing the states current Medicaid system.

But the state is still waiting on federal approval of the program. At this time, there is no indication the state will not obtain federal approval from the Department of Health and Human Services by the Jan. 1, 2013, implementation, according to an official at the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.Under the new system, state Medicaid recipients will be assigned to one of three corporate providers, called managed care organizations. Amerigroup, UnitedHealth Care and Sunflower State Health Plan, a subsidiary of Centene, are all Fortune 500 companies with headquarters in other states.

State officials said they expect Medicaid participants will start to receive enrollment packets for the new system sometime in November.

Managed care is a growing trend throughout the U.S. All states except three enroll Medicaid beneficiaries in some kind of managed care program, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation 2011 survey.

Kansas already uses two managed care companies, UniCare and Coventry, for HealthWave, which provides low-cost insurance for uninsured children and qualifying parents, according to the KDHE.

Nearly all of Kansas 380,000 Medicaid recipients will be placed under the three managed care organizations under KanCare. The Brownback administration has said the new program will not cut benefits, limit enrollment or lower provider compensation rates but will save the state $1billion over the next five years.

Alex Melugin, an administrator for Phoenix Home Care, is concerned that many patients will lose their targeted case managers, who work to make sure people are signed up and authorized to use Medicaid under the new plan. The three companies will now be in charge of those tasks, and Melugin said its unclear how helpful the companies will be if they dont have any incentive to get people signed up.

Although Melugin said his companys reimbursement amounts will stay the same for now, he said that the word from providers in other states is that some managed care organizations reduce the number of approved hours to be spent with patients if the company thinks those extra hours are unnecessary, and that could mean less revenue for the providers.

One of our concerns is if what happened in other states happens here, but I dont think it will happen overnight, Melugin said. We are afraid they will cut approved hours down.

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Kansas providers unsure of Medicaid replacement

Provincial governments for years have complained about the ballooning cost of providing health care.

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Health care changes in Ajax, Pickering can't mean fewer key services

Three local residents have stepped forward as candidates for two seats on the Del Puerto Health Care District board and are seeking votes in the Nov. 6 election.

Incumbents Jeannette Kessler and board president Anne Stokman want to keep their four-year seats, while challenger Ed Maring, who served on the board for 30 years before losing his seat in the 2010 election, hopes to return to the local board.

The Irrigator provided a series of questions for Kessler, Stokman and Maring.

Fred Beltran, who has served in the boards only two-year position, has no opponent to retain his seat.

Other board members are Harold Hill and Ramona East, whose terms expire in 2014.

ANNE IELMINI STOKMAN What do you specifically plan to accomplish if you are elected to the Del Puerto Health Care District board? Why do you want to be on the board?

I have served one term on the board; we have been through a lot of changes: a new building, a new CEO, electronic medical records and multiple physicians. We have excellent staff at the district office, ambulance and clinic. We have reached stability and are ready to move toward building additional health care services.

I have lived in Patterson my entire life. I have 30 years experience as a registered nurse working in the hospital, home heath, hospice, clinic manager, diabetes educator and nurse consultant. I want to continue to volunteer to help expand services in our community for health care, prevention and urgent care.

What are the immediate needs for health care on the West Side? What needs to happen to bring those services to Patterson?

We need radiology services, including ultrasound and mammograms.

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Three vie for two seats on Del Puerto Health board

NEW YORK, Oct. 11, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --More than half the U.S. population and their health care providers could soon have access to health data shared across multiple states and systems. A public-private partnership of states, public agencies, federally-funded health information exchanges (HIEs) and health information technology (HIT) companies has established a program to test and certify electronic health records (EHRs) and other health IT to enable reliable transfer of data within and across organizational and state boundaries.

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High costs, technical differences and long wait times for interface development are barriers to sharing health data among health care providers and across state lines. The coalition of 15 states, 37 technology vendors and 34 HIEs, representing more than 50 percent of the U.S. population, has created a robust, highly automated testing program to verify that, once tested, a system is capable of exchanging health information with many other systems. With this testing, a single set of standardized, easy-to-implement connections can support communication among systems.

The effort is being jointly led by the EHR/HIE Interoperability Workgroup, a New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC)-led consortium of states and vendors; and Healtheway, the newly formed public-private partnership of the eHealth Exchange, a network of 34 public and private organizations representing hundreds of hospitals, thousands of providers and millions of patients across the country.

This effort will build on and accelerate consensus on national standards, adopting EHR certification criteria and testing procedures as relevant and finalized for Stage 2 of meaningful use. Members of both groups will continue to provide feedback from these real-world implementations to the national health IT standard setting initiativesestablished by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC).

"Today's announcement brings together several activities supported by ONC over the past years: a core set of national standards, an Accredited Certification Body, the Public-private partnership that has emerged from the Nationwide Health Information Network Exchange, and the convening power of New York and other State Health Information Exchange grantees," said Dr. Farzad Mostashari, the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. "We look forward to working with this consortium to continue progress on interoperability and secure health information exchange, and to reflect what is learned in national standards as necessary."

The coalition selected the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT), the most experienced HIT certification organization in the U.S., to carry out the testing. As the compliance testing body, CCHIT will certify that the interfaces between the HIT and HIEs are consistent across multiple states and systems. CCHIT is also an Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) authorized certification body and is an accredited testing laboratory for EHRs. CCHIT is collaborating withAEGIS.neton the testing software, which is being developed under an open source license.

"The collaboration between the states and vendors to address a shared marketplace gap and work toward a mutual vision has been one of the remarkable aspects of this effort," said David Whitlinger, Executive Director of NYeC. "And momentum is building within both communities as states grow their HIE networks by working with the EHR and HIE vendors to provide seamless integration and clinical workflow, taking the market to a new level for the benefit of patients."

"The testing program Healtheway has developed with NYeC is the key to realizing secure and interoperable exchange of health information across organizational and geographic boundaries," said Michael Matthews, Healtheway President and Board Chair. "The launch of a compliance testing program will enable the eHealth Exchange to more than double participation and connectivity over the next 9 to 12 months."

Realizing that merging efforts with other states would create economies of scale and provide the vendor community with a single, consistent set of specifications, NYeC created the EHR/HIE Interoperability Workgroup last year. Over the course of 18 months, the group has developed technical and test specifications to address the major use cases of interoperable exchange. Around the same time, plans took shape to transition the NwHIN Exchange to function outside the federal government as a public-private network, now called the eHealth Exchange. To expand nationwide HIE, Healtheway and NYeC formed a strategic partnership to enable technology systems, public and private providers and health information organizations (HIOs) to have access to more efficient testing.

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Health IT Testing Program Will Enable Health Data Sharing For More Than Half Of U.S. Patients And Their Providers

Politics The Election's Choice On Health Care Reform

On the issue of health care reform, your choice on Election Day comes down to Obamacare or "repeal and replace."

President Barack Obama's position can be "summed up" in 2,400 pages. That's the length of his Affordable Care Act, the landmark 2010 health care overhaul informally known as Obamacare, which makes sweeping consumer-centric changes to common health insurance practices.

The law is closely modeled after the Massachusetts health insurance reform that Republican challenger Mitt Romney championed when he was governor of that state in 2006. But now, the former Massachusetts governor vows that if he's elected president, he'll repeal the Obama law and replace it with a more conservative alternative. But what that might look like is one of the campaign's big questions.

Obama is promoting the Affordable Care Act as he makes his case for a second term. Go to the health care section of his campaign website to find out where he stands, and what you'll find are links where you can "learn how Obamacare benefits you."

Under the law, insurers by 2014 may no longer: deny coverage to individuals with pre-existing conditions; impose lifetime or annual dollar limits on coverage; cancel coverage arbitrarily; limit doctor choice and out-of-network emergency services; or charge higher premiums based on gender or health status.

The act also allows young adults to remain on their parents' policy until age 26, and it provides a laundry list of preventive care screenings and services to all ages at no additional cost.

To help pay for this expansion of benefits, the law's "individual mandate" requires most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty. To help consumers find affordable coverage, new state marketplaces called exchanges will open in 2014, government tax credits will be available for low-income individuals and families, and states are encouraged to expand their Medicaid programs to millions of uninsured, lower-income Americans.

The Medicaid expansion had been a requirement under the law, but the U.S. Supreme Court made it optional for states.

Romney's campaign website says Obama's approach to health care reform takes the country in the wrong direction, by relying on "a dense web of regulations, fees, subsidies, excise taxes, exchanges, and rule-setting boards to give the federal government extraordinary control over every corner of the health care system."

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Voters will have their say on fate of Obamacare

In February 2010, I sat down to talk health-care policy with Rep. Paul Ryan. Ryan wasn’t yet the lion of the right that he is today, but he had a reputation as an unusually wonkish legislator, and he didn’t disappoint. In the interview , he was clearly well-versed on the issues, fluent in both his ideas and the main criticiques. He was also refreshingly willing to step off-message, as when he ...

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What I learned debating Paul Ryan

BENTONVILLE, Ark., Oct. 11, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --As health care costs continue to rise, Walmart is introducing a first-of-its-kind Centers of Excellence program that will offer its associates quality health care with no out-of-pocket cost for heart, spine, and transplant surgeries at six of the leading hospital and health systems in the U.S.

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The six designated health care organizations include the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio; Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pa.; Mayo Clinic sites in Rochester, Minn., Scottsdale/Phoenix, Ariz., and Jacksonville, Fla.; Mercy Hospital Springfield in Springfield, Mo; Scott & White Memorial Hospital in Temple, Texas; and Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, Wash. These organizations will give Walmart associates the opportunity to receive care at hospitals and medical centers geographically located across the country that specialize in heart, spine and transplant care.

"We devoted extensive time developing Centers of Excellence in order to improve the quality of care our associates' receive," said Sally Welborn, senior vice president of global benefits at Walmart. "We have identified six renowned health care systems that meet the highest quality standards for heart, spine and transplant surgery. Through these hospital systems, our associates will have no out-of-pocket expenses and a greater peace of mind knowing they are receiving exceptional care from a facility that specializes in the procedure they require. This is the first time a retailer has offered a comprehensive, nationwide program for heart, spine and transplant surgery."

The new Centers of Excellence program is being expanded from covering transplants, which began with the Mayo Clinic in 1996, to include treatment for certain heart and spine surgeries. Walmart's associates and their dependents who are enrolled in the company's medical plans will receive consultations and care covered at 100 percent without deductible or coinsurance, plus travel, lodging and food for the patient and a caregiver.

Patients must be healthy enough to travel for the surgeries. Four of the designated health care systems -- Cleveland Clinic, Geisinger Medical Center, Scott & White Memorial Hospital and Virginia Mason Medical Center, will offer specific procedures for cardiac surgery that include open heart surgery for coronary artery bypass grafting, heart valve replacement/repair, closures of heart defects, thoracic and aortic aneurysm repair and other complex cardiac surgeries.

Three of the health care systems -- Mercy Hospital Springfield, Scott & White Memorial Hospital and Virginia Mason Medical Center will perform spine procedures that will include cervical and lumbar spinal fusion, total disk arthroplasty, spine surgery revisions and other complex spine surgeries. Transplants will continue to be provided by the Mayo Clinic.

In providing this service at no cost to its enrolled associates, Walmart has worked with these Centers of Excellence health systems to provide exclusive and unique bundled pricing arrangements for these types of procedures. Through Centers of Excellence, Walmart is working with all the health care organizations to collectively share best practices that will allow collaboration around best measures of service and new industry findings in comparison to industry practices.

Quotes from Center of Excellence Hospital and Health Systems:"Healthcare is inthe midst of an unprecedented transformation and requires innovation toimprove the way we deliver care to patients across the United States," said Cleveland ClinicPresidentand Chief Executive Officer,Toby M.Cosgrove, M.D. "Programs such as these will helpget patients to the right place, for the right care, at the right time while focusing on quality outcomesand cost control."

"Geisinger is recognized nationally for innovations that enhance patient care and create value, including our ProvenCare best-practice approach to caring for cardiac disease," said Geisinger Health System President and Chief Executive Officer Glenn Steele, Jr., M.D. "As a result of this innovative program and the commitment of our expert caregivers and support team, our patients recover faster, spend less time in the hospital and experience fewer complications. We are pleased to partner with Walmart in its Centers of Excellence Program and look forward to caring for their associates with cardiac disease."

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Walmart Expands Health Benefits to Cover Heart and Spine Surgeries at No Cost to Associates

Joyce Beck, who runs a small hospital and network of medical clinics in rural Nebraska, is reluctant to plan for the future until voters decide between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. The candidates' sharply divergent proposals for Medicare, Medicaid and coverage of the uninsured have created too much uncertainty, she explained.

"We are all on hold, waiting to see what the election brings," said Beck, chief executive of Thayer County Health Services, based in Hebron.

When Americans go to the polls next month they will cast a vote not just for president but for one of two profoundly different visions for the future of the country's health care system. With an Obama victory Nov. 6, the president's signature health care law including the contentious requirement that most Americans obtain health insurance or pay a tax penalty will almost certainly come into full force, becoming the largest expansion of the safety net since Lyndon Johnson pushed through his Great Society programs almost half a century ago.

If Romney wins and Republicans capture the Senate, much of the law could be repealed or its financing cut back and the president's goal of achieving near-universal coverage could take a back seat to Romney's top priority, controlling medical costs.

Given the starkness of the choice, historians and policymakers believe this election could be the most significant referendum on a piece of social legislation since 1936, when Republican Alf Landon ran against Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal programs.

Nearly eight decades have passed, but the debate sounds strikingly familiar: Landon described the Social Security Act, passed in 1935, as "the largest tax bill in history" and called for its repeal.

"It is very rare for a political party to pass a social program of this magnitude and then to face the possibility of a rollback or repeal in a presidential election," said James A. Morone, a professor of political science at Brown University who has studied the history of health policy.

For Medicare and Medicaid, the government health programs for older Americans, low-income people and the disabled, the candidates have sharply different visions as well. Romney's proposals call for fundamental changes in the structure of the programs, placing more emphasis on private-sector competition and much less on government regulation.

Obama would expand Medicaid to cover millions more people; Romney would effectively shrink it, giving each state a fixed amount of federal money to cover its disadvantaged population with more control over eligibility and benefits. Romney would eventually give each Medicare beneficiary a fixed amount of federal money to pay premiums for either the traditional Medicare program or private insurance. Obama would preserve the structure of Medicare but try to rein in costs, in part by trimming payments to health care providers.

Passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 was, to many, Obama's most significant legislative accomplishment. But the law proved so divisive that undoing it has become a central rallying cry of Republicans seeking to retake the White House.

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Future of health care hinges on election

ROCKFORD Janice Purifoy is passionate about her job as a certified nursing assistant, and she hopes that passion is indicative of the need for a better contract for her and her fellow union workers.

Purifoy, whos worked 13 years as a CNA at Alden Debes Rehabilitation and Health Care Center in Rockford, joined other members of Service Employees International Union Healthcare Illinois on the picket line Wednesday outside Alden.

SEIU represents health care, child care, home care and nursing home workers in the Midwest. Purifoy and other nursing home employees in Illinois have worked without a contract since Dec. 31.

More than 2,000 workers were expected to join picket lines at 50 nursing homes, according to union officials. A common chant Wednesday was No contract, no peace.

Purifoy and Celena Clark, whos worked 7 years as a CNA at Alden Debes, are hoping to see some increase in pay without losing earned vacation time, which they said has been a point of contention during negotiations.

Theyre also concerned about staff turnover, which they worry affects the quality of patient care. We love what we do, and were just trying to get the message out that we deserve a fair contract, Purifoy said.

Union officials said contract talks are expected to resume Thursday.

Alden Debes is a member of the Illinois Association of Health Care Facilities a nonprofit group of more than 375 licensed and certified long-term care facilities and programs and a statement released by Alden Debes said the group has been negotiating with the union in good faith to renew the contract.

We are disheartened by the picketing and inflammatory comments made by the union in an effort to disrupt the ongoing negotiations, the statement reads. Alden wants to assure our residents and community that we will continue to provide quality care and services during the ongoing talks.

Melissa Westphal: 815-987-1341; at mwestpha@rrstar.com; @mlwestphal

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Health care workers picket in Rockford for fair contract