Latest California Healthline Stories
State of Nursing in the State of California
The National Summit on Advancing Health through Nursing was held in Washington, D.C., yesterday to officially launch a report called The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health. It listed the developments that need to happen in nursing during health care reform.
“This is the first day of the future of nursing,” Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, President and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, said at yesterday’s summit. “This is the day when we fill the critical piece of the health care picture. We are here not to reform but to transform how care is delivered.”
Donna Dolinar is on the board of the California chapter of the American Nursing Association, and she was at the D.C. conference.
Myth-Busting the Reform Law: Sea Change or Scapegoat?
A number of organizations have painted the health reform law as a catalyst for changes in their industries. Yet some groups may be invoking the law as a scapegoat for transformations that would have happened anyway, or using it as a convenient platform on which to advance their interests.
Emergency Departments Chafe at Low Payments, Lack of Help
Emergency departments in California often struggle to get paid for treating patients with a certain type of health insurance. In those cases, reimbursement is routinely delayed or denied, physicians say. Doctors complain that state officials are refusing to address the problem.
DMHC Not Listening to Complaints?
What if you gave a legislative oversight hearing, and the object of that hearing didn’t show up?
That was the case last week, when the Budget Subcommittee on Health and Human Services conducted an oversight hearing to deal with complaints about the Department of Managed Health Care. Emergency department officials, who feel they’ve been grossly and routinely underpaid by some insurance organizations, say the DMHC is supposed to adjudicate those conflicts, but has instead been ignoring them.
“This is extraordinarily disrespectful. I’m extraordinarily displeased they decided not to participate,” Assembly member Dave Jones (D-Sacramento) said.
Mapping Out Future for Rural Health Care
The problems faced by rural health providers go far beyond whether or not patients have insurance coverage, according to Danny Fernandez, legislative advocate for the National Rural Health Association, who spoke at the 10th annual conference of the California State Rural Health Association this week in Sacramento .
“At some point, ‘national health reform’ morphed into ‘national health insurance reform,’ ” Fernandez said. But it’s not just about making sure everyone’s insured, he said. “Our overall message to Capitol Hill was, if you don’t have access to a provider, then it doesn’t matter if you do or don’t have insurance coverage.”
That is probably the number one problem in rural areas throughout the state and nation, he said, along with a general lack of funding for rural health care. National health care reform, Fernandez said, might be able to address both concerns — by increasing funds through better insurance, and by offering incentives and programs to get medical providers into rural areas.
Rural Health Clinics Getting Short-Changed?
There was an interesting moment at this week’s annual conference of the California State Rural Health Association. During one of the presentations, a sit-down with two state Assembly members — V. Manuel Perez (D-Coachella) and recently elected Linda Halderman (R-Fresno) — the conversation seemed to veer away from rural health issues.
After hearing about high unemployment, the icy regulatory climate, too much government and arsenic contamination of water supplies, host Steve Barrow gently redirected the conversation.
“You know, rural [medicine] gets lost a lot in the Capitol,” he said. “We care about clean water, and cultural issues, and economic issues — but if we’re talking about economics in rural California, 11 percent of the rural economy is health care. Health care is a big part of economics in rural areas.”
Healthy Interest in Reform from Small Businesses
California’s small businesses are embracing the tenets of health care reform, according to John Arensmeyer, CEO of the Small Business Majority.
“The more people learn about it, particularly about the tax credits [offered by the Affordable Care Act], the more interested they are,” Arensmeyer said. “The real problem is that it’s a little unknown, so it’s important to get people to understand what’s in it.
According to a recent report by Bernstein Research in New York, more small-business employers — those with three to nine workers — are offering health insurance this year. Nationally, the number of small businesses offering insurance increased by 13 percentage points in a year, from 46% to 59%.
Urgent Care Clinics Arrive With Mixed Reviews in San Diego
The country’s only national urgent care franchise, Doctors Express, opened its first California-based center in San Diego this fall, with a second on its way in early 2011. Not everyone is convinced the new centers will provide much-needed relief to local emergency departments.
Primary Care Might Get its Due With Health Reform
It’s hard to delineate the possible progress being made in fixing the primary care problem in California and the nation, without first looking at how bad that problem is, according to Kevin Grumbach of the UCSF Department of Family and Community Medicine, who addressed an audience of health professionals at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento this week.
“Health systems and regions built with primary care have better outcomes, better quality of care, lower costs and more equitable care,” Grumbach said.
“The trouble is, we’re finding that the whole foundation of primary care is crumbling.”
End-of-Life Expert Susan Tolle on Rolling Out Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment
Susan Tolle of the Oregon Health & Science University spoke with California Healthline about how California could learn from Oregon’s experience implementing Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment.