Monday, March 07, 2005

States Try Diverse Strategies To Reform Health Care  Psychiatric News story - "Elected officials in every state recognize that health care is an unavoidable issue, and every sort of option—from limited benefit packages and mandate-free benefits to health savings accounts—is under consideration. In a season of dire austerity, and with little or no help from Washington, states are scraping together a variety of means for addressing health care access and quality within their borders. Most prominent among these efforts are 'premium-assistance' programs in which a state uses public funds to pay for a portion of the premium costs of employer-sponsored insurance for eligible populations, said Alan Weil, executive director and president of the National Academy of State Health Policy (NASHP), at last month's Health Action conference in Washington, D.C., sponsored by Families USA. Somewhat less common, given the thin margin with which states are working, are expansions of Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program. But some states are finding cost-cutting measures allowing them to grow those programs."  
  

Senator Sounds Alarm On Medicaid's Future  Psychiatric News story - "America's public health safety net is under assault, said Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.). Keynoting a conference sponsored by Families USA in Washington, D.C., in January, Clinton sounded a chord that would reverberate throughout the meeting—a combination of grim foreboding about the intentions of a second-term Bush administration toward the public health systems that have been the legacy of the liberal Democratic establishment and a defiant resolve to protect those systems against Republican efforts to privatize and downsize. 'These are perilous times for America's health care infrastructure,' the former first lady told a crowded ballroom at Washington's Mayflower Hotel. 'We are about to experience one of the most aggressive assaults on the structure and funding of public health programs in our history.' Clinton focused especially on administration proposals to cap Medicaid funding through block grants to states—effectively overturning the system of matching funding that has been in place since the program began 40 years ago—and the new prescription drug benefit under the Medicare Modernization Act..."