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Category Archives: Health Care

Health Care Ethics Internship: Reflections by Briana Britton, Santa Clara University Alumna – Video

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Health Care Ethics Internship: Reflections by Briana Britton, Santa Clara University Alumna
Briana Britton, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics Health Care Ethics Intern 2012-13, reflects on her experiences as an intern, in light of Santa Clara Unive...

By: Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University

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Health Care Ethics Internship: Reflections by Briana Britton, Santa Clara University Alumna - Video

Meditation for Valentine’s Day – How To Meditate for Beginners – You Have 4 Minutes – BEXLIFE – Video

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Meditation for Valentine #39;s Day - How To Meditate for Beginners - You Have 4 Minutes - BEXLIFE
FREE EASY MEDITATION TIPS: http://bit.ly/bexpeace MEET RACHEL DEALTO: http://racheldealto.9nl.be/okkp ------- GET MORE GOOD STUFF BELOW ------- HEALTHY...

By: Rebekah Borucki

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Meditation for Valentine's Day - How To Meditate for Beginners - You Have 4 Minutes - BEXLIFE - Video

Welsh Mountain Medical and Dental Center, Health Care, New Holland, PA – Video

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Welsh Mountain Medical and Dental Center, Health Care, New Holland, PA
http://www.superpages.com/bp/New-Holland-PA/Welsh-Mountain-Medical-Dental-Center-L2497363411.htm?lbp=1 Welsh Mountain Medical Dental Center provides qualit...

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Welsh Mountain Medical and Dental Center, Health Care, New Holland, PA - Video

Massachusetts Health-Care Law Improved States Finances, Chicago Fed Reports

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Massachusettss 2006 health-care reform law, which was similar in many respects to the 2010 federal Affordable Care Act, helped improve the financial health of Bay State residents, according to new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

We find that the Massachusetts reform improved financial outcomes across many dimensions: it improved credit scores, reduced delinquencies, lowered the fraction of debt past due, and reduced the incidence of personal bankruptcy, wrote Chicago Fed senior economist Bhashkar Mazumder and University of Notre Dame assistant professor Sarah Miller in a recent working paper.

The 2006 law sometimes called Romneycare after then-Gov. Mitt Romney required residents to buy health insurance, expanded the Massachusetts Medicaid program and mandated many employers offer coverage to their workers. Mr. Mazumder and Ms. Miller, among others, describe it as a model for the controversial 2010 federal law, often called Obamacare after President Barack Obama.

The economists analyzed credit-report data for Massachusetts residents from the Federal Reserve Bank of New Yorks Consumer Credit Panel dataset. The 2006 law, they found, had a number of significant effects: credit scores rose, delinquent debt fell and bankruptcies became less likely. The probability of a person having more than $10,000 in delinquent debt fell by about 21% and the chances of having $5,001 to $10,000 past due fell by about 10%.

The effects of the reform on credit score, personal bankruptcy, and delinquency are most pronounced for those whose credit scores were lower before the reform, but those with higher credit scores (and therefore, better access to credit), experienced a larger relative decline in total debt, they wrote.

The bottom line, according to Mr. Mazumder and Ms. Miller, is that the implications of healthcare reform extend into credit markets and household balance sheets. These results show that health care reform legislation has a strong effect not just on health and the use of health services, but across many measures of household well-being, they wrote.

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Massachusetts Health-Care Law Improved States Finances, Chicago Fed Reports

Native Hawaiian health care provider closing Hilo clinic

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Hawaiis health care system specifically tailored to serving Native Hawaiians is shutting down its primary care clinic in Hilo next month.

Hui Malama Ola Na Oiwis multiple other services, including community outreach, case management, health education and transportation, will continue to operate, but the primary care clinic at 305 Wailuku Drive will close March 8.

Hui Malama Executive Director Michelle M. Hiraishi said Wednesday that the private nonprofits board opted to close the clinic last month after years of struggling with withering finances and a crippling doctor shortage.

Weve been dealing with this, struggling to maintain our clinic, for many, many years, she said. All the community health providers have been facing this kind of struggle.

With an average of 400 patient visits a month, about 78 percent of Hui Malamas primary care clients are covered by Medicare or Medicaid, with 2 percent being uninsured, she said.

Unlike traditional community health centers, which enjoy higher reimbursement rates from Medicare and Medicaid, Hui Malama must cover its costs as if it were a private practice, Hiraishi said, severely cutting into its revenues.

Meanwhile, the clinic has had to deal with the severe doctor shortage that other providers on the island continue to face. Hui Malama has largely relied on advanced practice registered nurses to keep the clinic staffed, but that means that many of the patients who come in with advanced illnesses must be referred on to other providers.

At times, weve been able to get an MD-level provider on board, but we just have not been able to retain them usually, Hiraishi said.

The nonprofits board ultimately decided, after several attempts to keep the clinic in operation, that it would be best to keep Hui Malamas focus centered on outreach and education efforts, rather than on providing primary care, she said.

It was a really, really lousy, hard decision for our board to have to make, and it came after five years of trying something else every time. We were just struggling to survive, she said.

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Native Hawaiian health care provider closing Hilo clinic

New report forecasts health care reform law will decrease U.S. labor supply – Video

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New report forecasts health care reform law will decrease U.S. labor supply
In the Congressional Budget Office #39;s economic outlook report for 2014, analysts predicted that as many as 2.3 million will stop working or work less as a res...

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New report forecasts health care reform law will decrease U.S. labor supply - Video

Obamacare and jobs reports: Health care law could cost more than 2 million jobs – Video

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Obamacare and jobs reports: Health care law could cost more than 2 million jobs
A report conducted by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that because of the Affordable Care Act, the equivalent of two million workers w...

By: CBS This Morning

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Obamacare and jobs reports: Health care law could cost more than 2 million jobs - Video

Health care deadline to qualify for federal subsidy is March 31

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by Rudy Herndon Staff Writer Moab Times Independent

The looming date marks the end of the current open enrollment period under the new Affordable Care Act insurance marketplace at http://www.healthcare.gov. Its also the last chance this year that consumers will have to qualify for direct federal subsidies, which can lower their overall health insurance costs, depending on their annual income levels.

If youre going to receive a subsidy ... time is of the essence, Moab Regional Hospital Marketing and Communications Director Jen Sadoff said.

Fortunately, free help is readily available for local residents who want to find the best deals out there, yet may have trouble navigating the new marketplace on their own.

Moab Regional Hospital and the Moab Free Health Clinic recently teamed up to raise awareness about the options that are offered through marketplace, and to guide residents through the application process.

Interest to date has been strong especially among older and middle-aged residents, according to Moab Free Health Clinic Executive Director Allyson OConnor. But OConnor and Sadoff are encouraging younger people and anyone else who needs health insurance to take advantage of the services theyre offering at no cost.

The plans can be complex, OConnor said. Thats the value of going to either a certified application counselor at the hospital or the free health clinic, or going to a commercial insurance representative.

OConnor estimated that 60 percent of the free health clinics patients will qualify for some type of subsidy.

The best deals may be available to individuals who earn between $11,500 and $17,000 a year, according to Charlie Kulander, who serves as a certified application counselor at the free health clinic. Similar bargains may be out there for a two-person household with an annual income of $23,000, or a four-person family with a combined income of $36,000 a year, Kulander said.

Theyre going to get an incredible deal where in some cases they will pay $0 for their deductible [out-of-pocket expenses], he said.

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Health care deadline to qualify for federal subsidy is March 31

The Lonely Death of the Republican Health-Care Plan

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Last week, Republican Senators Tom Coburn, Richard Burr, and Orrin Hatch unveiled a health-care proposal or, at least, a close approximation of one. Conservatives hailed it as a seminal event, the moment when the Republican Party would finally dispel the accusation of mindless obstructionism and assert its full equal status as a vessel for serious health-care policymaking. Ross Douthat rejoiced, mirabile dictu,an actual health care reform proposal! The new plan explode[s] the myth, exulted a National Review editorial, that Obamacare or something like it is the only game in town.

Republicans are certainly going to have to abandon their indifference to policy and formulate an actual health-care reform policy. But the moment has not arrived, and the events since the plans hopeful emergence have made the gap between aspiration and reality painfully clear.

Within hours of the new plan coming into contact with political reality, things began to fall apart. The general outlines of the plan involved deregulating health insurance, so that healthy customers paid less for cheaper plans and sicker customers paid more, and shifting the tax burden off the wealthy and onto the middle class. Defining its effects more specifically has proven difficult. Its less a plan than an outline that, depending on how the authors filled in its missing details, could mean any number of wildly different things.

The first blow to its coherence came when the authors faced questions about their proposal to cap the tax deduction for employer-sponsored health insurance, a politically risky but economist-approved change that provided most of its money for covering the uninsured. Asked about this piece of their plan, the authors changed the language within hours to ratchet back its scope, insulating them from political attacks, but also neutering its value.

The next thing that happened was that, on Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office released a new budget update. The latest CBO estimate contained political gold for Republicans: It estimated that the availability of health insurance would spur workers to reduce their labor by the equivalent of two million jobs, a change Republicans could gleefully mischaracterize as destroying two million jobs. Of course any health reform plan would reduce employment this way if you give people the chance to leave the safety of employer-sponsored insurance without risking the horrors of the pre-Obamacare individual market, many of them will. The Republican proposal, sketchy though it was, would likely have approximately the same job-killing impact as Obamacare.

But while reveling in the potential new attack line, Republicans suddenly forgot that they had a plan other than repealing Obamacare. What was the fun in comparing Obamacare to a specific plan, with trade-offs and disruptions of if its own, when they could continue assailing every real or imagined downside of Obamacare, full stop?

Every Republican health-care reform plan in history has served the same purpose: to enable Republican politicians to say that they do indeed have a health-care reform plan, in order to block Democrats from enacting a health-care reform plan. Two of the sponsors of the new Republican plan, Coburn and Burr, also sponsored, along with Paul Ryan, a health-care plan in May 2009. It was a pretty good plan, albeit a somewhat vague one. It was based on replicating Mitt Romneys successful reform in Massachusetts in the other states. It set up health-care exchanges in every state, which would be regulated heavily. The plan, the authors wrote, prevents cherry picking when insurance companies choose to cover only healthy patients by equalizing risk across insurance companies and reversing the perverse incentives that leave those most vulnerable with the fewest options. It required that all health-insurance plans meet the same statutory standard used for the health benefits given to Members of Congress. Ezra Klein really liked it.

That sounds a lot like Obamacare, doesnt it? Indeed, it does. But Ryan, Coburn and Burr did not see their plan as fertile grounds for compromise. Instead they saw it as the free-market alternative to the European, socialistic horrors Democrats longed to impose upon America. In defending their plan, they pointedly contrasted it with Obamacares public option:

Nothing will rally ordinary Americans against the president's plan more than his allies arguing too forcefully for a system run by politicians and bureaucrats in Washington what we call the "public option" in the Obama plan

If Washington can effectively run a health program like Obama's public option, why are Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal health programs in such disrepair?

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The Lonely Death of the Republican Health-Care Plan

Health-Care Storm Roils White House Again

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Since Democrats passed President Barack Obamas health-care overhaul in 2010, the White House has tried to move its agenda beyond the storm of criticism that followed. Yet every time Mr. Obama and his aides find reprieve from one politically charged battle the Supreme Court case, the many Republican attempts to repeal the law and the 2012 election, to name a few another emerges.

This week it was a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that predicts the law will insure fewer people than expected and reduce the number of hours that Americans work by more than previously thought. Republicans seized on the findings.

The report came on the heels of Mr. Obamas State of the Union address, where he approached the issue in a way that suggested his team was looking to finally turn the page on months of embarrassing revelations about the laws rollout. Mr. Obama made clear in the speech that he was done apologizing for the botched rollout, which emboldened critics of the law and even turned some supporters of it into skeptics.

Instead he touched on the laws success stories and sought to refocus his agenda on the economy. He followed up with a series of events showcasing his new executive actions on the economy as he races to accomplish some of his economic goals.

That lasted about six days.

For the White House, the CBO report is distraction dj vu: its latest effort to set its own agenda once again has been cut short by the latest problem with the health-care law. The White House is again reacting to events, refighting old battles and trying to win the war of public opinion on Mr. Obamas health-care overhaul.

The cycle seems destined for repetition all year, no matter what message Mr. Obama tries to push. Republicans have long been determined to make the health-care law his political quagmire, and that includes making it a dominant fixture in Novembers midterm elections.The GOP plans to highlight every hiccup in the law and every story that suggests its now working up to the standard Mr. Obama promised.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee used the CBO report to criticize Democratic candidates, saying their support for the health-care law has dire consequences for their constituents.

So many of the promises these Democrats repeatedly made about ObamaCare have turned out to be false, and unfortunately middle-class Americans continue to pay the price, Brook Hougesen, NRSC press secretary, said in a statement.

For the White House, this means having to continue fighting a rearguard action that keeps overshadowing Mr. Obamas agenda.White House press secretary Jay Carney faced questions about the report Wednesday, while trying to highlight Mr. Obamas economic initiatives. He argued that the report was largely positive news for the White House, saying it showed the law will cut the deficit and insure millions of Americans. But Republicans seized on it to feed public skepticism about the law.

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Health-Care Storm Roils White House Again

Former Red Hat COO Helps Health Care Providers Work Together (Video)

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Do you remember the worries about getting different health care software systems to work with each other as health care providers starting moving away from paper? It's still a problem, but Joanne Rohde's company, Axial Exchange, is working to cure that problem not only as an entrepreneur but also because she has personal reasons to see health care providers communicate better with each other. In a 2012 interview for Huffington Post, she said, "While I was working for Red Hat, I got very sick... I ultimately had to go to 10 doctors to be diagnosed. Going from doctor to doctor, I could not believe I had to start over each time. No one actually talks to each other I became convinced that if I had had all the information, I probably would have been able to figure it out faster." In fact, Joanne got so sick that she quit her job as Red Hat COO after four years with the company. Once she started getting decent treatment for her Fybromyalgia and started getting better, she decided to apply open source principles to health care IT -- and to start a new company to do it. Opensource.com talked with Joanne in September 2013, and in January 2014 she talked with Health Care Finance News for an article titled Patients key to reducing readmissions. A phrase Joanne seems to be using a lot lately is "patient engagement," which has become a major part of Axial Exchange's work to improve communications not only between different health care providers but also between those providers and their patients. Update: 02/05 20:16 GMT by T : If you're seeing this post on beta.slashdot.org, note that we're still ironing out the details of video display here. You can view the video on tv.slashdot.org, instead. Please pardon our dust.

Robin Miller:This is Joanne Rohde who is the Founder and CEO of Axial Exchange a company thats busily working to make it easier for healthcare providers to share healthcare records, that is your patient records safely, securely and quickly. She was recently quoted as saying patients are the key to reducing readmissions How is that? What does that mean?

Joanne Rohde:Well, I think that we are moving from what I call the myth of the Dr. Welby healthcare system, and I think it was always a myth that there is this all-knowing physician thats going to take care of you and your family to the reality that we are a nation of chronic disease. As we jokingly say sometimes no one gets well in the hospital, what do we mean? You might be diagnosed in the hospital, you might get patched up in the hospital, you might get your tests taken, but you get well once you leave. If you get well. And healthcare really hasnt recognized that yet. And so they dont really meet the patients where they live and where they improve

The second thing in this parochial view of patients is this idea that patients really cant understand what they need to take care of their health. And that is just a myth, because any sick person Ive ever talked to wants nothing more than to get better. And they are much more vested in that than the healthcare provider, I dont care what economic incentives we change in this country, your physician is not living your life.

And then thirdly, I think the healthcare organizations have not done the minimal job of trying to see the world through the lens of the patient. So even though were starting to make progress in selling to healthcare organizations I often hear the patient relationship referred to as the last mile. So whats their view of the world? Their view of the world is: Here is the hospital, we are theheartof the world, youre going to come in here and were going to fix you up. First were going to fix whats going on thats wrong in our hospital, then were going to fix whats going wrong between the hospital and the other docs.

And then when we think weve got that, were going to talk to you, the patient. Instead of going the other way around and going, Well, wait a minute, this just isnt working, it isnt working where we are first place in costs, we are37th place inresultshow are we going to really check this? We are a nation of chronic diseases, theres nothing anybody can do in my care thats going to change that. Thats the question that we got to be able to answer as a country. And it is with the patient.

But where it is supposed to be a relationship between the healthcare providers and the patient gets to I think three different things: Teach me, engage me, and track me. And what that means is essentially is starting with the teaching, tell me what I need to know about my disease, let me learn, I might not have been reading it before I got sick, probably not, but now that I am sick, if you give it to me in a way that I can understand it I will learn it. So the big phrase there is in a way that I can understand it. Everybody has had that experience of standing in a doctors office with them going through the language of Greys Anatomy and you go What?, thats why part of the reason why we only maintain 8% of what we hear in a hospital situation when we get home.

The second is we dont do normal teaching even if we have the ability to get the phrases we dont teach that, we dont use testing, we dont use any of the things that we know get people to learn, so we dont employ any of those techniques. So it is not surprising that people dont really understand about their illnesses because they do not really talk about them when it comes right down to it.

The second in terms of engage me, comes to the, how are we going to work together, and that has everything to do with building a care team. So its not just the doctor you see, but do I have a physical therapist, do I have a mental health professional, have I seen a nutritionistall the pieces that youre going to need to get engaged in taking care of your own health and how do they share information.

And then finally track me, and I think there is a lot of proof coming thats not just for triathletes, I think that whether we like it or not anytime you ever written down everything you eat all day long, and its a pain to do so, anytime youve ever tracked how many steps you take, it really teaches you about yourself. And normally you can just ignore it, but if youre sick you might want to change it. So the measurement is very key. So those are really the three buckets, I think that we have to address if we are going to get patients to take responsibility in a way removed from a lose-lose situation, which is where I think healthcare is today, to a win-win situation where theres something in it for both the patients and the providers.

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Former Red Hat COO Helps Health Care Providers Work Together (Video)


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