June 16, 2012 in Health

MARK SHERMAN and RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR Associated Press

J. Scott Applewhite photo

This Jan. 25, 2012 file photo shows the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington. Some are already anticipating the Supreme Courts ruling on President Barack Obamas health care law as the decision of the century. But the justices are unlikely to have the last word on Americas tangled efforts to address health care woes. The problems of high medical costs, widespread waste, and tens of millions of people without insurance will require Congress and the president to keep looking for answers, whether or not the Affordable Care Act passes the test of constitutionality. With a decision by the court expected this month, a look at potential outcomes.() (Full-size photo)

WASHINGTON (AP) Some are already anticipating the Supreme Courts ruling on President Barack Obamas health care law as the decision of the century.

But the justices are unlikely to have the last word on Americas tangled efforts to address health care woes. The problems of high medical costs, widespread waste, and tens of millions of people without insurance will require Congress and the president to keep looking for answers, whether or not the Affordable Care Act passes the test of constitutionality.

With a decision by the court expected this month, here is a look at potential outcomes:

___

Q: What if the Supreme Court upholds the law and finds Congress was within its authority to require most people to have health insurance or pay a penalty?

Read the original here:

Possible outcomes in pivotal health care law case - Sat, 16 Jun 2012 PST

Gail Amundson is trying to remember who said something to the effect of "a mind stretched by a new idea never goes back to the same shape."

Turns out she's paraphrasing words from an influential U.S. Supreme Court Justice of the past, Oliver Wendell Holmes, in reference to what promises to be one of the current Supreme Court's most influential decisions in decades - the much anticipated ruling on the groundbreaking law nicknamed "Obamacare," which is expected later this month.

Amundson's point echoes a point made by Methodist Medical Center CEO Debbie Simon and many others in the health care industry.

No matter what the Supreme Court decides, the Affordable Care Act has stretched the country's idea of health care and it's not going back. More than 50 provisions of the law have already been implemented, many of them not only accepted but well-liked, according to opinion polls.

"Health care is in the process of remaking itself as we speak," says Amundson, CEO of Quality Quest for Health of Illinois. "The health care reform bill contributed to that in a significant way."

Adds Simon, "Health care reform, in one way or another, will continue."

Considering the nation's health care costs, the billion-dollar question is what's "one way or another" and how will it be financed?

Even before the Supreme Court's long-awaited ruling, three major insurers have already announced they intend to continue several of the law's most popular provisions, including allowing young people to stay on their parents' insurance plans until the age of 26 and eliminating co-pays for preventive health care benefits, such as immunizations.

And even before that, four years before President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, the forerunner of Quality Quest, a collaboration of employers, insurers, health care providers and health care recipients, began the process of remaking health care in central Illinois.

Many of the law's components are already evident locally, such as health care providers' moves to electronic records or OSF Saint Francis Medical Center's involvement as a pilot accountable care organization, designed to improve quality while lowering costs.

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Area health care officials say reform will continue one way or another

Looking at the universe of stocks we cover at Dividend Channel, on 6/19/12, Coventry Health Care Inc. (NYSE: CVH) will trade ex-dividend, for its quarterly dividend of $0.125, payable on 7/9/12. As a percentage of CVH's recent stock price of $32.88, this dividend works out to approximately 0.38%. Click here to find out which 9 other stocks going ex-dividend you should know about, at ...

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Coventry Health Care About To Put More Money In Your Pocket

NEW YORK (Real Money) -- A couple times a week, I check my sector scans to get a sense of which are home to the largest number of top-performing stocks. For the past several weeks, the number of companies from the health care sector has far outweighed the runner-up consumer sector.

Link:

Big-Cap Health Care Winners

By Hannah Weinberger, Special to CNN

updated 10:13 AM EDT, Fri June 15, 2012

The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the constitutionality of the health care reform law this month.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

(CNN) -- While many changes to Americans' health care outlined in the the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act don't take effect until 2014, a Supreme Court ruling expected this month could stop those changes from coming at all.

The act, often referred to as "Obamacare," is a step toward guaranteeing insurance coverage for all Americans and received enough support to pass in Congress in 2010. However, the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments on several of its core issues in March. The court may rule on the issues by the end of this month.

Basics: Health care reform issues

No matter the ruling, most Americans will be affected. Here are some of the issues being discussed right now:

Business owners

One hundred and sixty million Americans receive health care from their employers, many of whom set their own rates for their employees. If the court rules against the act, employees might face higher premiums, fewer network providers, higher-deductible plans and more stringent regulations on adding adult dependents.

Link:

Health care reform: Issues roundup

Earlier this week I wrote about new projections on health spending, from the Medicare actuaries. It predicted that health-care cost growth would be slow through 2013 just as it has been in 2010 and 2011 but then start growing faster as the economy recovers.

What I didnt look at there was exactly how much faster, and that turns out to be important. When you crunch the numbers, you find that the Medicare actuaries expect health-care costs to grow 0.9 percent faster than the rest of the economy between 2015 and 2021. For health care, thats actually a relatively low number, especially when you consider what health-care costs growth looked like in the past.

To put that in perspective, a lot of health-care plans often aim to limit health-care cost growth to Gross Domestic Product plus 1 percent, and thats usually seen as a lofty goal. Thats the target Massachusetts is trying to hit in the cost control bill its now debating. And the Medicare actuaries think that could be the road were headed down.

Harvard Universitys David Cutler passes along this chart that shows historical cost growth rates for health care, dating back to 1960.

These numbers suggest that, over the course of five decades, health-care cost growth has come more in line with the overall growth of the economy. There is a blip in the 2000s that as you can see in the above note likely has to do with the economys slower growth during the recession.

Its also worth noting here that the Medicare actuaries tend to overestimate health-care cost growth. They went back and did an analysis of their work recently, and found that they tend to predict costs growth thats 0.4 percent higher than actually occurred. If the Medicare actuaries perform similarly with this report or even if 0.9 percent growth turns out to be the case the country would have the slowest rate of health cost growth that its seen in decades.

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Maybe health-care growth is really slowing

The upcoming Supreme Court decision on health care reform will have littleimpact eitherway on the rising cost of health care in the United States, according to a new federal study.

The report by independent economists at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, estimates that America's annual health care costs are expected to continue to climb over the coming decade, regardless of the fate of health care reform.

By 2021, our annual health care bill is estimated to reach $4.78 trillion if the Affordable Care Act is upheld by the court or $4.72 tillion if the justices toss it out. Both are more than double the $2.8 trillion we're projected to spend onhealth care thisyear.

The findings take some steam out of the election-year rhetoric regarding the immediate economic impact of the Affordable Care Act. Critics claim health care reform will drive up health care costs significantly while supporters claim it will lower costs eventually. The study suggests that the truth lies somewhere in between.

"The growth rate of national health spending is projected to be fairly similar with or without the Affordable Care Act," according to Sean Keehan, lead author on the report.

Between 2014 and 2021, CMS estimates that per-household spending on health insurance premiums will increase 6.8 percent on average every year.

Medicare spending is projected to grow by 6.9 percent annually between 2014 and 2019 as more and more baby boomers sign on. That number would have been worse, the report says, but for provisions in the health care law and a 2011 budget deal that cut hundreds of billions of dollars from the program over the coming decade.

At the same time, Medicaid spending is projected to surge 7.3 percent annually as more lower-income Americans qualify for federal health care subsidies. An estimated 30 million uninsured Americans are expected to gain health coverage under the Affordable Care Act beginning in 2014. Many of those will be eligible for Medicaid subsidies that will be available to those making up to four times the federal poverty line, or $92,200 for a family of four.

The report says that after 2014, total health care spending is projected to grow more slowly with health care reform than without, due to the law's "medical loss ratio" provision, which requires insurers to spend at least 80 percent of premiums directly on health care, and a new tax on high-cost "Cadillac plans" scheduled to begin in 2018.

As for the potential cost savings of other health care reform provisions, including establishing Accountable Care Organizations designed to help doctors and hospitals work together more efficiently, Keehan says it's too soon to predict their impact.

Excerpt from:

Court ruling won’t alter costs

By Hannah Weinberger, Special to CNN

updated 10:13 AM EDT, Fri June 15, 2012

The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the constitutionality of the health care reform law this month.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

(CNN) -- While many changes to Americans' health care outlined in the the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act don't take effect until 2014, a Supreme Court ruling expected this month could stop those changes from coming at all.

The act, often referred to as "Obamacare," is a step toward guaranteeing insurance coverage for all Americans and received enough support to pass in Congress in 2010. However, the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments on several of its core issues in March. The court may rule on the issues by the end of this month.

Basics: Health care reform issues

No matter the ruling, most Americans will be affected. Here are some of the issues being discussed right now:

Business owners

One hundred and sixty million Americans receive health care from their employers, many of whom set their own rates for their employees. If the court rules against the act, employees might face higher premiums, fewer network providers, higher-deductible plans and more stringent regulations on adding adult dependents.

More:

Health care reform issues

ENGLAND, Ark. As a construction worker and logger, Bryan L. Mashburn does what he describes as backbreaking, muscle-pulling work, laying concrete foundations for water towers and felling 3,000-pound trees. He has no health insurance, and he tried to avoid going to doctors when he crushed a finger on one occasion and metal shavings flew deep into his eye another time.

Brian Mashburn, 39, is a construction worker and logger without health insurance. Changes in Medicaid scheduled to occur under the new health care law will help people like Mr. Mashburn gain access to affordable health care.

Mr. Mashburn, 39, is exactly the kind of person who stands to benefit from changes in Medicaid scheduled to occur under the new health care law a vast expansion of the program that is expected to add 250,000 people to the rolls here in Arkansas and 17 million across the country.

The expansion of Medicaid if it is upheld by the Supreme Court is among the most significant parts of the law, as it will provide coverage to people with the greatest financial needs. Many health care advocates support the expansion, saying it will allow poor people to receive needed care, while many state officials, especially Republicans, worry that it will bring budget-breaking new costs.

The expansion may also strain the health care system, given the shortage in some places of primary care doctors, who will be vital to expanded coverage.

The Supreme Court, which is expected to rule on the health care law this month, devoted more than an hour of argument to the Medicaid provision.

Arkansas illustrates not only the potential benefits but also the major challenges facing states as they plan for a larger Medicaid program. The state does not have enough doctors and other health care workers to care for all the new beneficiaries, experts say, and state officials worry about the costs.

The expansion of Medicaid is a sea change, and its occurring at the most difficult fiscal time in the history of the program, said the Medicaid director in Arkansas, R. Andrew Allison, who is the president of the National Association of Medicaid Directors. States are preoccupied with the challenge of sustaining the Medicaid program we already have.

Arkansas officials have discussed cutting Medicaid services in the coming year to help close a gap between Medicaid costs and expected state appropriations. The gap up to $400 million represents more than one-fourth of state spending on the program.

Medicaid is jointly financed by the federal government and the states, with Washington paying 50 percent of the costs in higher-income states and about 70 percent in lower-income states like Arkansas. States have historically had leeway to define eligibility and benefits within guidelines set by federal law.

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In Health Care Ruling, Vast Implications for Medicaid

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Posted June 14, 2012

Courtesy of Motley Fool

By Seth Jayson

Margins matter. The more Coventry Health Care (NYSE: CVH ) keeps of each buck it earns in revenue, the more money it has to invest in growth, fund new strategic plans, or (gasp!) distribute to shareholders. Healthy margins often separate pretenders from the best stocks in the market. That's why we check up on margins at least once a quarter in this series. I'm looking for the absolute numbers, so I can compare them to current and potential competitors, and any trend that may tell me how strong Coventry Health Care's competitive position could be.

Here's the current margin snapshot for Coventry Health Care over the trailing 12 months: Gross margin is 23.3%, while operating margin is 6.5% and net margin is 4.7%.

Unfortunately, a look at the most recent numbers doesn't tell us much about where Coventry Health Care has been, or where it's going. A company with rising gross and operating margins often fuels its growth by increasing demand for its products. If it sells more units while keeping costs in check, its profitability increases. Conversely, a company with gross margins that inch downward over time is often losing out to competition, and possibly engaging in a race to the bottom on prices. If it can't make up for this problem by cutting costs -- and most companies can't -- then both the business and its shares face a decidedly bleak outlook.

Of course, over the short term, the kind of economic shocks we recently experienced can drastically affect a company's profitability. That's why I like to look at five fiscal years' worth of margins, along with the results for the trailing 12 months, the last fiscal year, and last fiscal quarter (LFQ). You can't always reach a hard conclusion about your company's health, but you can better understand what to expect, and what to watch.

Here's the margin picture for Coventry Health Care over the past few years.

Source: S&P Capital IQ. Dollar amounts in millions. FY = fiscal year. TTM = trailing 12 months.

See the original post here:

Does Coventry Health Care Miss the Grade?

The Supreme Courts decision on the Affordable Care Act could have a profound effect on health-care innovators. (Jacquelyn Martin - AP) The Supreme Court could rule on the Affordable Care Act the health-care law spearheaded by President Barack Obama any day now.

Nearly all eyes, in the media at least, are on the High Court, and there is no shortage of speculation as to when the ruling will come down and how the justices decision could impact the future of the health-care industry. Its not just health-care insurers, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies that could be impacted by a potential change to or a complete strike-down of the law, the Supreme Court ruling will also impact the new generation of tech companies that are fundamentally changing how we think about health care.

If the Supreme Court does not strike down the law, the clear winners will be the tech innovators. These individuals are among those at the forefront of navigating the nations complex health-care system. Call this The Health care IT Scenario. Its one in which VCs shift their attention to companies that help health-care providers slash costs, digitize their medical records and streamline the payment process to insurers.

Take, for example, Castlight, a Silicon Valley company that just raised a $100 million round of venture capital one of the largest deals in the history of health-care IT. The goal of Castlight is to bring transparency to health-care costs by making it possible for employees to compare the cost and quality of a wide range of tests and procedures.

On the other hand, if the Supreme Court strikes down all or parts of the Affordable Care Act, there would be an opening for Mitt Romney's health-care vision to take root. As Romney outlined in a campaign speech Tuesday, he would use private sector tactics to transform health care into a "consumer market much like the tire, automobile or air filter markets. That vision may not sound sexy (Its time to rotate the tires, dear!). But it hints that the future of health-care innovation might shift to low-cost, high-quality medical devices that help us maintain good health and diagnose diseases and disorders. In their book Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think, Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler outline some of the "zero-cost diagnostics" that are reducing the cost of complex hospital tests to a couple of bucks.

There is another way, though, in which the health-care innovation landscape could stand to change, and it is potentially even more compelling: The tighter coupling of health care and mobile technology. Sometimes referred to as "mobile health" (mHealth), this third way requires thinking of health care as something that does not occur in a hospital environment, but as something that occurs in the palm of your hand via Web-enabled devices.

The mHealth movement, from a global perspective, is one of the most exciting trends in the health-care space for its ability to bring health-care coverage to people who previously did not have it. It has even resulted in a $10 million prize competition to develop the first medical tricorder. As areas like artificial intelligence heat up and as mobile operating systems become increasingly powerful, its easy to imagine a future in which the capabilities of IBMs Watson are available as a diagnostic medical app, iPhones are transformed into medical devices such as ECGs, and medical data can be transmitted to doctors in real-time from digital devices hooked to your body.

Heres hoping that the Supreme Court ruling does not impact the ability of Internet innovators who are fundamentally transforming how we think about medicine to continue with their groundbreaking new ideas. Faced with the prospect of health care as a "big, government-managed utility" or as a neighborhood tire and automobile parts shop, Ill take my chances with the innovators of Silicon Valley.

View Photo Gallery:The World Economic Forums Global Agenda Council on emerging technologies released its top 10 emerging technology trends for the year.

Read more news and ideas on Innovations:

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The Supreme Court’s health-care innovation moment

Will Silicon Valley lead health care's next revolution -- or miss it?

Reuters.

(Editor's Note: the following commentary was co-authored with Tory Wolff, a founding partner of Recon Strategy, a healthcare strategy consulting firm in Boston.)

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors have never quite been able to figure out health, and they know it.

For years, the clever technology fixes dreamed up by engineers have largely failed to take hold, their well-conceived rationality no match for the complexity of medical care, the persistence of clinical habit, and the counter-intuitive impact of existing incentives. Many of the Valley's most audacious VCs have become leery of the space, electing instead to pursue innovation elsewhere.

The new battlefield is on the technologists' home turf: information systems for electronic medical records (EMRs). Will this time be different? Are technology entrepreneurs finally ready to disrupt medicine?

Here's the context (please see our last commentary, available here, for more details). Most of the nation's largest and most prestigious medical centers seem headed towards a relatively closed health information system, driven by a single dominant private company, Wisconsin-based Epic, which excels at the near-flawless, customized installation of their client-server platform in big hospitals.

While Epic is meticulously working its way through the largest hospitals, the long tail of stand-alone ambulatory practices operate largely on a jumbled mess of EMRs, using many emerging vendors (such as AthenaHealth and PracticeFusion) with a multi-tenant model, similar to salesforce.com.

Since medical care as a whole is consolidating, the basic question is whether emerging EMR vendors will gain enough traction and offer enough capability to enable stand-alone practices to remain independent. Or will platform fragmentation put unaffiliated practices at such a competitive disadvantage that they'll be even more motivated to join up with larger hospital systems (the most important of which will rely upon Epic)?

What makes Epic particularly interesting is that its success seems to fly in the face of how so many of us -- Silicon Valley technologists in particular - have come to view innovation; it also contrasts with the much-celebrated, widely accepted strategy of open innovation.

Read more:

Is One Company About to Lock Up the Electronic Medical Records Market?

UCSF-led Finding Calls for Policy Changes for Underprepared Prison System

Newswise Soaring numbers of older, sicker prisoners are causing an unprecedented health care challenge for the nations criminal justice system, according to a new UCSF report.

As the American penal system confronts a costly demographic shift toward older prisoners, the authors call for an overhaul in health care practices for elderly inmates who disproportionately account for escalating medical expenses behind bars. The recommendations include screening for dementia among prisoners, improved palliative care, and standard policies for geriatric housing units for infirm inmates.

The article will be published online June 14, 2012, in the American Journal of Public Health.

The report outlines nine policy recommendations that emerged from a gathering last year of 29 national experts in prison health care, academic medicine, nursing and civil rights.

The recommendations promote cost-effective quality care for older prisoners, said lead author Brie Williams, MD, a UCSF associate professor of medicine in the division of geriatrics.

A first step is to focus on these nine priority areas in order to set the stage for collaboration among the many disciplines involved in older prisoner health care, Williams said.

From 2000 to 2009, the countrys prison population grew by 16 percent, and the number of older prisoners 55 years or older increased nearly 80 percent.

As a result, prisons are increasingly challenged to provide care to older inmates with a litany of chronic medical conditions including diabetes, heart failure, cognitive impairment and end-stage liver disease. Many older inmates also suffer from infectious diseases such as HIV, tuberculosis and hepatitis C. With higher rates of disability in general, older prisoners cost approximately two to three times as much as younger inmates.

Prisoners have a right to timely access to an appropriate level of care for serious medical needs, the authors said in the report. Yet criminal justice health care systems are underprepared to provide cost-effective quality care for older adults.

Originally posted here:

Elderly Prisoners Need Better Medical Care, According to Report

by Paul Tosto, Minnesota Public Radio

June 13, 2012

St. Paul, Minn. The U.S. Supreme Court will rule soon if all or part of President Obama's landmark 2010 health care law is unconstitutional. Here's a look at the law, the Court's review and what's at stake.

Controversy dogged the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act before President Obama signed the bill in March 2010. It was almost a given that it would fall in the Supreme Court's lap.

The law dramatically changed many aspects of the nation's health care system. The changes, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation:

Republicans and Democrats have battled for years over the law's future costs to individuals and employers, and its requirement that citizens buy health insurance or pay a penalty.

That requirement is one of the key pieces the Supreme Court has under constitutional review.

Key questions NewsHour Supreme Court analyst Marcia Coyle told PBS the justices agreed to decide several questions about the health care law:

Leavitt Partners, a health care consulting firm led by former Utah Republican Gov. Michael Leavitt, has a very readable infographic forecasting the politics of the potential Supreme Court decision. An example:

No matter how the Supreme Court rules, some of the nation's largest health insurers say they'll keep pieces of the Affordable Care Act in place. That includes the nation's largest insurer, Minnesota-based UnitedHealth Group Inc.

Original post:

MPR News Primer: Federal health care law

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Parties Strategize for Dealing With Supreme Court Decision on Health Care

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Health Care Reform Repeal Would Rob 4-Year-Old Jackson Whaley of Health Security

Any day now, the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on whether the Obamacare insurance mandate is constitutional. Seems like a no-brainer to me. How can forcing me to engage in commerce be constitutional?

But there's a deeper question: Why should government be involved in medicine at all?

Right before President Obama took office, the media got hysterical about health care. You heard the claims: America spends more than any country $6,000 per person yet we get less. Americans die younger than people in Japan and Western Europe. Millions of Americans lack health insurance and worry about paying for care.

I have the solution! said Obama. Bigger government will give us more choices and make health care cheaper and better. He proceeded to give us that. Bigger government, that is. The cheaper/better/more choices part not so much.

Costs have risen. More choices? No, we have fewer choices. Many people lost coverage when companies left the market.

Because Obamacare requires insurance companies to cover every child regardless of pre-existing conditions, WellPoint, Humana and Cigna got out of the child-only business. Principal Financial stopped offering health insurance altogether 1 million customers no longer have the choice to keep their insurance.

This is to be expected when governments control health care. Since state funding makes medical services seem free, demand increases. Governments deal with that by rationing. Advocates of government health care hate the word rationing because it forces them to face an ugly truth: Once you accept the idea that taxpayers pay, individual choice dies. Someone else decides what treatment you get, and when.

At least in America, we still have some choice. We can pay to get what we want. Under government health care, bureaucrats will decide how long we wait for our knee operation or cataract surgery ... or if we get lifesaving treatment at all.

When someone else pays for your health care, that someone else also decides when to pull the plug. The reason can be found in Econ 101. Medical care doesn't grow on trees. It must be produced by human and physical capital, and those resources are limited. Politicians can't repeal supply and demand.

Call them death panels or not, a government that needs to cut costs will limit what it spends on health care, especially on people nearing the end of life. Medical ethicists have long lamented that too much money is spent in the last several months of life. Given the premise that it's government's job to pay, it's only natural that some bureaucrat will decide that 80-year-olds shouldn't get hip replacements.

Originally posted here:

More government won't fix health care

To meet growing demand for qualified managers in the increasingly complex health care industry, Excelsior College has introduced a health care management concentration in its online MBA program. It is collaboration between Excelsior’s Schools of Health Sciences and Business & Technology.Albany, NY (PRWEB) June 14, 2012 To meet growing demand for qualified managers in the increasingly complex ...

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Excelsior College Adds Health Care Management Concentration to its MBA Program

WASHINGTON -- Even as President Barack Obama's health care law expands coverage and transforms the way millions get medical care, it will have little effect on the total U.S. health care bill, a new government report finds.

Health care spending is expected to continue to surge over the next decade, hitting about $4.8 trillion in 2021, independent economists at the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services estimate.

That is up from $2.8 trillion this year and will push health care spending to nearly 20 percent of the U.S. economy by the beginning of the next decade.

The new estimates -- the latest annual projection from the federal government -- undermine claims by critics that the law will dramatically drive up health care spending. At the same time, they underscore some of the law's limitations.

"The growth rate of national health spending is projected to be fairly similar with or without the Affordable Care Act," said Sean Keehan, lead author of the report.

Total health care spending over the next decade will be about 1 percent higher -- or about $478 billion -- as result of the law, even with the federal government spending hundreds of millions of dollars to guarantee nearly all Americans coverage for the first time.

After the law is fully implemented in 2014, total health care spending is expected to grow more slowly than it would without the law, the report said.

The economists estimate that 30 million more people will gain coverage

Many of those people are expected to qualify for federal subsidies that will be available to people making up to four times the federal poverty line, or $92,200, for a family of four.

But the new estimates also show how little the law will do to fundamentally change the trajectory of health care spending.

More:

U.S. health spending likely to keep rising, with or without Obama's plan

DeKALB Nicole Dispensa is heading toward a job in health care, but she believes her hometown of Stillman Valley lacks the resources to learn more about that career path.

Dispensa, 17, wants to pursue a career in clinical lab sciences. In a town with a population of about 1,100 people, its not easy to come by people in that profession.

Its hard to find people to shadow, at least for what I want to do, she said.

Dispensa is among 42 high school students from rural areas in 19 northern Illinois counties participating this week in the eighth Rural Health Careers Camp. The camps goal is to address the need for more health care providers in rural areas, said Vicki Weidenbacher-Hoper, coordinator for the National Center for Rural Health Professions in Rockford.

The camp includes CPR training, games such as Disease Detective, hands-on labs and talks with health care professionals.

Students also will compete in a race that includes a bedpan relay and laboratory matching game.

The three-day camp started Wednesday at Northern Illinois University. The camp is a partnership among NIUs School of Nursing and Health Studies, National Center for Rural Health Professions and the Northwestern Illinois Area Health Education Center.

Weidenbacher-Hoper said students from rural Illinois are more likely to return to areas near their hometowns to practice medicine.

In rural Illinois, theres a shortage of health professionals across the board, she said. We use the grow your own model. We want to invest in what we have in rural Illinois.

Matt Hunsaker, director of the rural medicine education program at the University of Illinois in Rockford, said students in rural areas typically have a harder time finding information about health care fields than students in urban areas.

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Camp addresses shortage in rural health providers