Health junction

Having served as a health care and public policy book reviewer for the independent New York Journal of Books, I thought I would share some of the "good reads," with you as NYJB is closing its site. My latest review, "Breasts, A Natural and Unnatural History," by Florence Williams is featured on the banner page for the site. It is a historical, scientific, and anthropological review of breasts, sociologically, scientifically, and as a bell weather for toxins in our society. Florence Williams will be in Seattle this month reading from her book. http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/review/breasts-natural-and-unnatural-history The best book I have read about the long term problems in United States health care delivery and what the 2010 reforms may mean is "The Battle Over Health Care, What Obama's Reforms Mean," by Rosemary Gibson and Janardan Prasad Singh. Singh is an economist with the World Bank and Gibson is formerly with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation,...

Why We Don�t Want To Get Rid of Medicare-Our Best Tool for Health Care Reform The pressure is on for federal budget slashing and of course social programs (not defense) are top-of-the-list for cost reductions, including the malignant call for block granting the Medicare program. Having previously analyzed the Bush Administration�s Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, including the odious federal government, �claw back provision� for reducing federal contributions for state Medicaid programs, this article reviews some potential impacts of a block grant or per capita allowance for Medicare participants. Parallels are drawn between the Medicaid changes and what may happen to Medicare if it is schlepped to the states. Finally, Medicare�s impact on overall health care policy making in the United States is analyzed. Would Block Granting Medicare Look like the Medicaid 1115 Waiver Plans? As of 2005, half the states already had approved Medicaid 1115 plans including: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Cal...

State By State Analysis of Public Health Service Act Requirements for Employers in the United States The Public Health Service Act of 2010 requires most employers in the United States to provide group medical insurance for their employees. Employers who choose not to comply with this law will be fined, as authorized in Section 490-H of the Internal Revenue Code. Employers with fifty or more employees are required to offer health insurance to their employees who work, on average, thirty or more hours a week. And the insurance plan must meet certain affordability standards, the employer must pay part of the cost and the plan has to meet certain eligibility requirements for enrollment equity. The global purpose of this act is to increase the proportion of people who have access to health care in the United States.   Evidence of the ability to pay for medical treatment through insurance thus contributes to this goal. The data source for the fifty-state-analysis, came from the Nationa...

Without Insurance Access to Health Care is Limited in the United States Why the Insurance Model Was Chosen for Increasing Health Care Access One of the things I learned while a student at the School of Public Health and Community Medicine was that people who lacked health insurance also lacked reliable health care. Let us review some of the national data in this regard. In my fifty-state analysis I reviewed the following components for individual health care measures: evidence of employer based health insurance, the state uninsured population, infant mortality and other clinical outcomes. Listed below are the top performers for the criteria, as well as the laggards. States with the Highest Levels of Health Insurance, Public or Private Using the latest Kaiser Family Foundation Insurance Survey , the 2010 results show the number one state for health insurance coverage is Massachusetts, with 95% reporting health insurance plans. Massachusetts has been the model for the national insurance...

Wrangling Over Proposed Insurance Exchanges and Standard Health Care Benefits Takes a Nasty Turn Barely recovering from the last congressional gaffe about redefining the rape of a woman in a transparent attempt to get out from under the federal Hyde Amendment criteria for Medicaid payments, the �powers-that-be� have made another mind blowing error in public engagement. In a nutshell and yes, I do mean all of these puns, here is the latest blunder by the Republicans controlling the house. In a public hearing for testimony on the federal health insurance exchanges and standardized benefits for primary health care, which includes birth control options as benign as birth control pills, no women were allowed to testify at the hearing . It certainly is curious that those who are actually capable of pregnancy are excluded from the hearing. This refusal was despite vigorous opposition by female congresswomen. I actually listened to the hearing in order to believe it. And the woman they refus...

How Profit-taking Distorts Health Care Delivery in America Recently, a Public Broadcasting Station (Channel 9) featured a story on a for-profit hospital group which was using obscure diagnostic codes to achieve higher Medicare payments. The level of unethical and fraudulent activity was so egregious that more than one of their billing coders quit their jobs and testified against their former employer. The Wall Street Journal has also reported on fraudulent Medicare billing, including requisitioning public records from CMS(Medicare) and identifying abusive billing practices by multiple clinicians. For example, the New York City osteopath who billed Medicare 2 million for family medicine, when this was not the nature of her medical practice. WSJ staffers examined the Medicare database and uncovered 25 billing codes for an array of expensive medical tests which were regularly performed by 20 other clinicians in the country. Of that group, 33% have already been convicted of fraud, have u...

Diabetes Current-State and Changes to Come Unless you are Cro-Magnon-man and just emerged from a glacial field you are probably aware of some of the 2010 health care reforms. This article reviews how the United States got to be in such poor shape, health-wise and how some provisions of the 2010 reforms will create incremental changes. Since I am nearly finished with my second book, the Russell Guide for Diabetes: Type I or Type II This Could Happen To You , let me share some mind boggling information about this scourge. The American statistics on this disease have a huge impact on government funded health plans, including Medicare and these metrics from the CDC explain why : � The proportion of diagnosed diabetics in the United States has increased by more than 50% since 2007; 17.7 million in 2007 and 25.5 million in 2010 � Fully one third of the U.S. population is expected to be diabetic by 2025; 115 million � In 2010 18.7% of the 25,564,000 U.S. residents diagnosed as diabetic were ...