Latest California Healthline Stories
Exchange Picks New Name: Covered California
The California Health Benefit Exchange board voted Tuesday to adopt a new name for the health insurance coverage it will offer starting January 2014 — Covered California.
The decision comes after months of work. In August, the long list of potential names was winnowed to about a dozen possible names — including CaliHealth, CalAccess, Wellquest, PACcess and Covered California. The list alos included unusual trademark names such as Ursa, Healthifornia, Eureka, Beneficia, Cal-Vida and Condor, as well as the crowd favorite, Avocado.
After designing logos, holding focus group meetings and running trademark searches, that list was cut down to four finalists in September: Ursa, Eureka, CaliHealth and Covered California. Trademark concerns emerged around Ursa and CaliHealth, and those names were dropped, said Chris Kelly, who made the final name presentation to the exchange board.
Health Care on California Ballots, Directly and Indirectly
California voters will deal directly and indirectly with health care issues in next week’s elections. On city and county ballots, voters will decide issues ranging from soda taxes to medical marijuana laws. Statewide propositions have potential for indirect but significant repercussions for health care.
How Health Care Changed While You Were Watching the Election
A handful of recent deals and reforms in the private sector could prove to be transformative for health care — and may ultimately matter more than who’s sitting in the Oval Office.
Assembly Committee Examines State’s Moves to Medi-Cal Managed Care
The Assembly Committee on Health last week asked for a progress report and assurances from Department of Health Care Services officials that the state was not only ready to move many Medi-Cal beneficiaries into managed care, but also ready to evaluate the process.
“The purpose of this hearing is to focus on what’s happening with the outcomes and evaluations of our various transitions,” said the new chair of the Assembly Committee on Health, Richard Pan (D-Sacramento).
“There are four major transitions in California — the SPDs [seniors and persons with disabilities], the dual eligibles project [also known as the Coordinated Care Initiative, or CCI], taking our Healthy Families program into managed care and taking our rural communities into managed care, as well,” Pan said. “So there is certainly a lot of movement going on.”
What HHS Would Look Like Under President Romney
Paging Bobby Jindal: With Mitt Romney surging in the polls, “Road to Reform” examines what HHS might look like — and who could lead it — under his administration.
State Policy Leaders Steer Clear of Politics at Conference
Three weeks before a national election that could prove pivotal for health care reform, policy leaders and state administrators carefully avoided talking politics during three days of the National Academy for State Health Policy’s annual conference.
Local, National Reforms Both Needed, Policy Leaders Told
BALTIMORE — Although their approaches may appear to be at odds with each other at the onset, a top federal bureaucrat and a national business leader assured health policy leaders Wednesday that government and commercial interests can work together effectively to reform the country’s health care system.
“We’ll figure it out together. We may not figure it out as quickly as people might like, but we will get there,” said Richard Gilfillan, director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation.
Gilfillan and Andrew Webber, president and CEO of the National Business Coalition on Health, shared the podium to deliver a tandem farewell address at the National Academy for State Health Policy’s 25th annual conference.
Health Policy and Winnie-the-Pooh
BALTIMORE — How health care is like A Bear of Very Little Brain:
“Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.”
— A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
“That is what we are here to do — think of another way of doing things,” said Richard Gottfried, chair of the New York State Assembly Committee on Health and moderator of a well-attended panel on payment reform Tuesday at the National Academy for State Health Policy’s annual conference.
How Wal-Mart May Have Just Changed the Game on Health Care
Wal-Mart last week announced a new bundled payment plan with six leading hospitals, which was immediately overshadowed by the presidential race. But the groundbreaking plan — the latest major health care development in the private sector in recent weeks — holds tremendous potential to change U.S. health care.
Educator Praises Health Policy Officials for ‘Noble Work’
BALTIMORE — “I would argue that what you face in health care is very similar to what we face in education — revenues are down and needs are up,” Freeman Hrabowski III said in his keynote address Monday at the opening of the National Academy for State Health Policy’s 25th annual conference.
Quoting poets William Carlos Williams and Maya Angelou and evoking the legacies of Franklin Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr., Hrabowski told state policy wonks “the work you do is noble, but the situations we face are not easy. It comes down to how you respond. Aristotle said ‘excellence is never an accident.’ I think we need to remember that as we move forward,” Hrabowski said.
Hrabowski — president of University of Maryland, Baltimore County and one of Time Magazine’s choices of the 100 most influential people in the world — did his homework before addressing the NASHP crowd.