Wednesday, June 04, 2003

The Rural Psychologist
Special section in the June 2003 issue of the APA Monitor, featuring 10 articles, among them Beyond 'urbancentrism', Telehealth gets back to basics and Knocking down access barriers.  
  

Bush Administration Medicaid/SCHIP Proposal
This policy brief (in Adobe Acrobat format) from the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured "provides a detailed explanation of what is known about the key elements of the proposal and includes a discussion of the proposal's implications." See also the page of links to background materials on proposal.  
  

SAMHSA Issues New Materials to Promote Services for Children of Addicted Parents
SAMHSA press release - "The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) today released new materials to help substance abuse treatment professionals design programs to help children of addicted parents cope with the effects of their parents’ addiction. SAMHSA estimates that about 6 million children under age 18 were living with at least one parent who abused or was dependent on alcohol or drugs in 2001, based on a new analysis of the data in the agency’s 2001 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse." Information on ordering the materials is included.  
  

A Privacy Law's Unintended Results
New York Times article on some of the unintended results of the HIPAA rules on privacy - "the first federal privacy standards to limit how health care providers — hospitals, physicians, pharmacists and health insurers — can use and release medical information." [Viewing New York Times resources requires registration, which is free].  
  

Governors Finalizing Proposal to Revamp Medicaid
Washington Post story - "The nation's governors are nearing agreement on a plan that would fundamentally redesign Medicaid, handing states vast new powers to set health benefits for the poor, in exchange for ending part of the federal promise that subsidies will keep pace as the program grows. The draft plan, which has considerable support among Republican and Democratic governors, is similar in some of its basic contours to a proposal that the Bush administration issued four months ago to revamp the country's largest public insurance program. But the governors' version, which is to be refined during the next few days, would give states greater freedom over Medicaid and would loosen caps on federal payments that the administration has proposed."