hospitals
Housing community explores successful CT collaborations to promote health
Over 300 Connecticut affordable housing stakeholders joined Governor Lamont and other speakers at the Affordable Housing Alliance’s 30th annual conference last week. The Governor explained his focus on affordable housing by relating a conversation with a young bus rider in New Haven who’d been homeless as a child. With help from housing care managers, he…
Read MoreState approves controversial New Haven primary care move
Friday, the state Office of Health Strategy gave final approval Yale-New Haven’s application to move primary care for over 25,000 low income consumers out of neighborhoods and shift them to the Cornell Scott and Fairhaven health centers for payment purposes. Under the final agreement patients would still be cared for by the same YNHH primary…
Read MoreJoin us: CT affordable housing conference features health/housing connection
Join us at Housing 2019, the 30th annual CT conference on affordable housing, to hear about collaborations in CT between housing and community health programs that are improving both. The conference is sponsored by the Affordable Housing Alliance of CT (formerly the CT Housing Coalition). At “Health and Housing: Learning from Each Other”, attendees will…
Read MoreProposed federal rule would require hospitals to post negotiated rates
A new proposed federal regulation (called a “rule”) would allow consumers to compare negotiated service prices by hospital and by payer. These would be the real prices paid by insurers, both hospital and payer-specific prices, as well as gross prices. This information could be extremely helpful for consumers without insurance and those with high deductibles…
Read MoreComments needed on federal proposal to erode medical debtors’ rights
The National Consumer Law Center is asking people who care to submit public comments on the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s proposed debt collection rule. Medical bills are the biggest cause of bankruptcy and the top reason for contact by collections. Unfortunately, that burden falls very heavily on Connecticut residents. Health insurance premiums for both…
Read MorePCMHs in CT – not the “shiny new toy” anymore but moving forward improving care, controlling costs
Ten years ago, patient-centered medical homes (PCMHs) were exotic in Connecticut. PCMHs are one of the best documented innovations to improve health. PCMHs are primary care practices that help keep people well by assessing needs, coordinating care, and giving people the skills and resources to maintain their own health. As a nurse managers told me,…
Read MoreNew PCMH + plans overlook past problems
Wednesday DSS and Mercer unveiled their thinking about plans for Wave 3 of PCMH Plus, Medicaid’s controversial shared savings program. Results from PCMH Plus’s first year, Wave 1, were disappointing with increased state costs and little evidence of improvement in quality. Based on the problems identified in Wave 1, advocates made recommendations to fix those…
Read MoreCT ranks 5th among states in health system performance this year, up from 9th last year
Connecticut’s health system performs better than all but four other states, according to the latest Commonwealth Fund State Scorecard. We are first in Healthy lives, up from sixth last year. Surprisingly, we also do very well on Access & Affordability (sixth) – it must be the access part. But we have a lot of work…
Read More2019 Connecticut legislative session – what happened and what didn’t happen
Download the full report Connecticut’s General Assembly debated an unusually large number of health-related proposals this year. Some were new and some have been debated for years. Some passed, some were rejected, and some are on hold for next year. As of this writing, only the minimum wage increase bill has been signed into law…
Read MoreState budget deal restores coverage for 4,000 HUSKY parents, a move toward quality-based payments, and insurance protections
Policymakers have reached a $43 billion state budget deal to cover the next two fiscal years, on-time before the end of the session. For health policy folks, there is a lot to like in the deal but a few notes of caution. The best part is a partial restoration of HUSKY parents’ eligibility cuts from…
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