Thursday, July 24, 2003

Voucher Program will Benefit Recovery Community
Article at Join Together that is a response to another article published earlier this month - "Bob Curley, in his July 10th article about the President's proposed Access to Recovery program, presents a view of addiction recovery that is centered in treatment. The article presents views that are skeptical of community or faith based paths to recovery, inasmuch as these recovery assets are presented as not conforming to traditional treatment outcome measures. It is as if treatment is the goal of all this activity. As Curley notes, the Senate appropriations committee that recently declined to fund the initial request for funds for this program conceded that 'there are many paths to treatment'. Recovery advocates see treatment as one path to recovery."  
  

Report: Removing Addicts SSI Benefits a Failure
Story at Join Together - "Research into the ramifications of removing addicted individuals from a federal Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program in 1996 shows that most individuals have not returned to work as originally projected, the Associated Press reported July 21."  
  

Medicaid and Ticket to Work: States’ Early Efforts to Cover Working Individuals with Disabilities
A report (in Adobe Acrobat format) available at the Open Minds web site - "As of December 2002, 12 states had implemented Medicaid Buy-In programs under the authority of the Ticket to Work legislation, which was effective October 1, 2000, enrolling over 24,000 working individuals with disabilities. These states used the flexibility allowed by the legislation to raise income eligibility and asset limits as well as cost-sharing fees. Across the 12 states, income eligibility levels ranged from 100 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL) in Wyoming to no income limit in Minnesota, with 11 states setting income eligibility limits at twice the FPL or higher. In addition to increasing income and asset levels, these states required participants to buy in to the program by charging premiums, ranging from $26 to $82 a month, and copayments, generally ranging from $0.50 to $3 for office visits and prescription drugs."  
  

Some Mental Health Cost Controls May Increase Employers' Long-Term Expenses
Press release from the Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health - "Some mental health plan benefits designed to contain costs by restricting access to care may actually increase an employer’s expenses over the long-term, according to an analysis of mental health plans conducted by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Workers in plans with high deductibles, preexisting condition exclusion periods or “carve-out” benefits that provide separate, specialized mental health coverage were found to be less likely to return to work after suffering a mental disability. The research results suggest that money saved by restricting access to care is offset by higher employee turnover costs. The study appears in the September 2003 issue of Mental Health Services Research . It is among the first to examine long-term mental health disability cost issues." There is an abstract of the study available free of charge, but full text is only available for a fee.  
  

Medscape Journal Scan: HIPAA, July 2003
A selection of articles from The Food & Drug Letter, Federal Computer Week, Network Computing, the Journal of American Health Information Management Association and Medical Economics. [Viewing Medscape resources requires registration, which is free].  
  

NAMI Releases new TRIAD Report
Story at the NAMI web site on the Treatment/Recovery Information and Advocacy Database report, which was released yesterday - "People living with mental illness in America are paying a high price for failures of the mental health system and continuing public stigma. In a national survey of 3400 people living with the most serious mental illnesses, 86% were in the prime of life, between 18 and 54, but two-thirds are unemployed: 55% live on an annual income below $10,000. In the absence of community treatment, nearly half were hospitalized last year; 40% had crisis emergency care." See also the full report (Adobe Acrobat format).