Latest California Healthline Stories
Dooley Reacts to Brown’s Speech, Florida Ruling
It has been three weeks since Governor Jerry Brown first floated his ideas for trimming a $25.4 billion deficit, which included roughly $6 billion in cuts to health-related services.
Since then, legislators have listened to hundreds of Californians objecting to those cuts in budget hearings. Diana Dooley has sat in on hearings, talked with the subcommittees and spent a lot of time with legislators and staff to kick around all of the cuts and their possible alternatives.
“I could come up with eight or 10 programs that are [candidates for amending cuts],” Dooley said after Brown’s State of the State speech last night, “but it’s premature to say where there might be modifications.”
How California Progress Fits With Federal Report
A new federal report on lowering health insurance costs has a distinctive California flavor to it.
One of the main points of the report from the Health and Human Services agency is to quantify the savings to families and individuals who participate in a health benefits exchange. Since California is the first in the nation to establish a post-health-reform exchange, this state is a bit of a poster child for how the health reform law will work.
Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones joined national health secretary Kathleen Sebelius in a conference call on Friday to discuss the new federal report.
Pan Named Chair of Health Care Work Force Committee
Richard Pan, a pediatrician newly elected to the Assembly from Natomas (near Sacramento), was named this week to chair the Assembly select committee on health care work force and access to care. It’s a subject the Democrat knows well, since he worked as the director of the pediatric residency program at UC Davis before winning his Assembly seat in November.
The dearth in physicians and other providers in the state is felt particularly strongly in rural and underserved urban areas, he said. The first step to fixing that, he said, may be to have more training and development of health professionals.
“What we want to try to look at is to find effective ways to deal with geographic maldistribution of providers, and to find and leverage funding to enable people to enter health professions,” Pan said.
Budget Subcommittee Gets an Earful
Even before the Senate budget subcommittee started yesterday, chair Mark DeSaulnier (D-Concord) asked the packed chamber for a little indulgence.
“We’re about to have a four-hour hearing on what’s going to be a very difficult subject,” DeSaulnier said.
“So please don’t get cranky with the chair,” he said, “I just want to make sure everyone gets heard.”
Medical Loss Ratio Threshold Goes to 80%
The Department of Insurance already regulates a 70% medical-loss ratio on insurers of individual health plans so it was not a huge leap to bump that limitation to 80%, given the new federal standard at that level, according to Janice Rocco, deputy commissioner of health policy for the DOI.
“We maintain the [current state requirement of a] 70% medical-loss ratio,” she said, “and we also need to comply with the federal 80% ratio, which is calculated in a different way than the state ratio.”
The state Office of Administrative Law agreed, and yesterday granted the Insurance Commissioner and his department the authority to enforce those federal standards.
Health Cuts Raising Seniors’ Hackles
It doesn’t sound like much, the meeting of Senate subcommittee #3.
But tomorrow’s subcommittee hearing is the first time the Legislature will be discussing some of the $1.7 billion in proposed Medi-Cal cuts.
That includes elimination of the Adult Day Health Services program, which Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown hopes would save the state $177 million of general fund money. Lydia Missaelides, executive director of the California Association for Adult Day Services, doesn’t believe it.
Small Businesses Eligible for Health Insurance Incentive
Only 43% of small business owners are familiar with a tax credit that could help pay their health insurance costs for employees, according to a national survey released last week by the Small Business Majority (SBM).
“I’m not surprised,” John Arensmeyer of the California chapter of the SBM said. “There has been a lot more heat than light shared on this law, so there’s been a lot of confusion.”
Arensmeyer has worked on a statewide “listening tour” for the past nine months, talking to small business owners about the creation of California’s health benefit exchange and the potential savings from the tax credit.
Mandate Bills Merit Independent Review
Maternity care. Tobacco cessation. Mammograms. HPV vaccinations. Hearing aids for children.
These are just a few of the legislative attempts at mandates for health insurance coverage in California. Each of those proposals needs to be evaluated before it hits committee. The under-the-radar group that does those evaluations — the California Health Benefits Review Program — has issued 68 CHBRP reports since 2004.
The CHBRP held its annual legislative briefing yesterday in Sacramento. And, honestly, it was worth attending just to hear men in suits say the acronym “Cha-BURP” over and over again.
Dental Evaluation Now Part of MRMIB Effort
The Managed Risk Medical Insurance Board has about 875,000 subscribers — so when it evaluates which health plans show the highest quality improvements, that information is important for quite a number of Californians.
This year, it chose six organizations that showed overall superior performance in the quality of care for children in Healthy Families, California’s version of the federal State Children’s Health Insurance Program administered by MRMIB:
Hope Raised by Patient-Centered Medical Home
Robert Reid thinks he has seen the future, and it comes from Washington.
Not D.C. — the state of Washington.
That’s where Reid of Seattle’s Group Health Research Institute has seen the patient-centered medical home in action, and that’s what he was preaching to medical leaders in Sacramento yesterday.