health insurance

Greetings all! Health Care for All NC has begun its short-session "Two Over Ten" push, but this time it is not focused on Verla Insko's "Health Care for All" bill. Instead, this session the push is for House Bill 1897, which creates a Healthcare Policy Council that would make recommendations to the General Assembly on how to integrate public and private healthcare services to form an effective, coordinated system of healthcare for North Carolina.

IT IS TIME TO ACT: GO TO THIS WEBSITE AND let your voice be heard Please.
To learn how Parity is being thwarted behind the scenes: NCPW

To do something about it: Go here.

Enter Senators Rand and Jones who introduced a bill that would experiment with privatizing Medicaid in North Carolina:

March 21, 2007

A BILL TO BE ENTITLED

AN ACT TO DIRECT THE Department of Health and Human Services, Division of Medical Assistance, TO ESTABLISH A PILOT MEDICAID HMO PROGRAM.

A Medicaid HMO is a very bad idea.

The state's managed care approach for Medicaid works very well. We have saved millions of dollars and are delivering better services. Community Care Network of NC is a network of 14 non profit agencies the state contracts with to hook Medicaid recipients up with primary care doctors to so the recipients get regular check ups and ongoing care as needed.

I'd just like to bring another blog to everyone's attention; I hope this is okay, as I don't have much to add. DrSteveB at DailyKos presents an outline of recent proposals for "universal health care" that he says benefit the insurance companies and don't do much for the people in the way of bringing low cost health care to everyone. I'd be grateful for your comments, either here, or at his blog.

Greetings all!

I was originally going to write this ONLY for the Chapel Hill, NC area folks, as we had our first meetup this week, and this was going to be the follow-up.  However, I think that the advantage of the internet is that you can instantly have opinions from around the world, not just your one little corner.  So, with that in mind, I'm going to list what I think are the major Headings of Action for Health Care and some of the ideas that were presented last night by Chapel Hill One Corps members.  

I'd ask that all of you contribute new Headings or Ideas to the mix in the comments and I will update the post as time permits.

I posted this previously at johnedwards.com, but I was hoping that some locals would have ideas for me.

If you are against Universal Healthcare/Single Payer Healthcare, your biggest enemy is Medicare. Medicare is an excellent single-payer system that covers a huge number of people with lots of serious medical conditions for a reasonable price and with low low overhead (2% versus 30%). So, if you are a Republican in the White House and in the Legislative Branch, what do you do?

You starve the program into submission. You don't come right out and say you are going to kill off Medicare, because no one will support that. But, you start trimming benefits here, making more paperwork there, donut-holes for you, and then you slowly undercut the whole program by making it unattractive to doctors. That is the secret plan if you will of the Republican Congress. Undercut medicare so that less doctors accept it, talk about what a lousy plan it is, and suggest privatization.
crossposted at CountryCrats

Adam Searing is the Director of the North Carolina Health Access Coalition. My one experience with Adam was watching his downtrodden and negative take on healthcare at a Chapel Hill forum. That and he doesn't support the push for UHC at this time, which I disagree with. He's been fighting for healthcare reform longer than any of us, but I think maybe he needs a change of scenery.

That aside, he has put together a good postmortem on why the high risk pool died a lonely death (PDF). It is easy to see why Mr. Searing (his resume says graduate degrees in law and public health, but I don't think they are Ph.D.s, if so, I apologize) is downtrodden on healthcare reform in North Carolina. The high risk pool would have covered somewhere between 9,000 - 20,000 North Carolinians. There are 1.5 million uninsured. This bill would have covered 0.1% of them, and it didn't pass. I'll cut and paste a few things after the break, but the PDF is a good read.

As a true-believer in the Democratic Party, I hate it when I am let down by the party. One of the things that I believe will make us a greater country is universal healthcare. When Americans are healthier they are better workers, better parents, and better citizens. Just as with education, healthcare is a right that all North Carolinians have inherent to their being – it is not a privilege bestowed upon those with the most money. Yet, in our society we too often kill off our poorer citizens by denying them healthcare. Make no mistake, the inability to have preventive care leads to lethal illnesses that could be stopped earlier in the disease progression. Look no farther than curable childhood diseases, which under a universal healthcare plan could be screened for in every newborn. Instead, many of our children suffer through their whole lives with physical and mental retardation all for the lack of a blood test at birth.

So, what have we as Democrats in North Carolina done for better healthcare? Well, not much. Certainly not as much as the Republican governor of Massachusetts. More below the fold.

Congressman Charles Taylor's first television ad of the campaign season, brought to you as part of a $10 million multi-district campaign from the United States Chamber of Commerce, touts Taylor's record on Medicare. It's disturbing to think that Charles Taylor's benefactors believe they can fool western North Carolina's seniors into ignoring their own experiences with Medicare Part D.

When the Republican led Senate and House passed the Budget Reconciliation Act of 2005, they did so without the support of one Democrat, and with a number of Republican defections. Why? The reason is simple, the budget gives more tax cuts to the ultra-wealthy while at the same time seriously putting in peril the very lives of millions of Americans. The Budget Reconciliation Act should go down in history as the Republican End of Medicaid Act. Hopefully, this destruction of Medicaid will play a major role in the 06 elections, but I’m not sure it will. Once again, the Republicans have been crafty. They have changed the rules on Medicaid in a way that will do serious harm to disabled children, the blind, the elderly, and the less fortunate in our society – but they have done so in a way that will not hurt them until AFTER the midterm election.

To help clarify this situation and what will be happening down the road, we at BlueNC have asked State Rep. Verla Insko to provide us some facts on the new Medicaid cuts and regulations. Rep. Insko has just filed to run for her sixth term in the 56th NC House district, representing most of Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and one Orange County Precinct. Rep. Insko is eminently qualified to answer questions on potential Medicaid cuts, as she Vice-Chairs the Appropriations Committee; Chairs the Appropriations Subcommittee on Health and Human Services, the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee on Mental Health, Developmental Disabilities and Substance Abuse; is a member of the Health, Environment and Natural Resources Committee; and, serves on the Joint Legislative Oversight Committees on Education and Health, where she Chairs the Access Subcommittee of the House Select Committee on Health Care.