public health
Op-Ed: Governor’s Healthcare Record Misses Opportunities
Last week, the Governor and his administration held a press conference nominally to promote their efforts to lower healthcare costs, but mostly for damage control. There’s been understandable criticism of the state insurance department’s decision to trim the unjustified insurer rate increase requests for next year from 20% to 13%. Insurers have been very profitable…
Read MoreAnother gift from COVID – CT life expectancy dropped 1.9 years in 2020
In 2020, Connecticut life expectancy at birth dropped to 78.4 years, down 1.9 years from 2019, according to a new CDC report. Life expectancy dropped in all states. Any drop is awful, but Connecticut’s metric is still tenth best in the nation, behind Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont. New York had the largest drop in…
Read MoreAgain, no CT hospitals on US News Honor Roll
None of Connecticut’s hospitals earned a spot on US News Best Hospitals list this year, as in 2018 and 2011. New York had three hospitals in the top 20 Honor Roll and one Massachusetts hospital made the list. This echoes the Lown Institute’s hospital rankings this year for social responsibility. US News ranked Yale-New Haven…
Read MoreCT is 24th in public health funding
Connecticut has a chronic problem with underfunding public health. We aren’t alone, but we’ve done little to fix the problem. The pandemic should’ve made crystal clear the value of a strong public health surveillance and response system. Like all prevention, we have to fund it before we need it. In 2021, Connecticut ranked 24th in…
Read MoreCTNJ Op-Ed: Insurers’ explanations for extreme rate increases don’t make sense
Connecticut’s health insurers are asking state regulators to let them increase premiums an average of 20.4%, far more than last year’s 8.6% request. Insurers in other states are asking for less than half as much. Connecticut insurers are blaming increased demand for services due to COVID backlogs, that deductibles aren’t keeping up with rising costs,…
Read MoreCT NJ Op-Ed: We need better, smarter solutions
There’s a lot of news about the Supreme Court’s decision on abortion and the latest mass shootings. Efforts to preserve women’s choices and bring sanity to our gun laws are critically important. But we don’t spend as much time finding upstream solutions to prevent problems, so we won’t need a fix. This blindness is very…
Read MoreCT next to last for at-risk youth, in a good way
Nationally 12.6% of Americans ages 16 to 24 are at-risk compared to 9.7% of Connecticut youth. Connecticut does better than all states but Massachusetts in protecting our youth from harmful conditions such as poor health, neither working nor in school, or drug use. WalletHub compared youth between states on 16 measures of risk including homelessness,…
Read MoreBook Club — Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement
Noise – A Flaw in Human Judgement by Daniel Kahneman, Oliver Sibony, and Cass Sunstein, is long, so it sat on my bookshelf for awhile. But it’s worth the time. Noise is the variation in judgements that shouldn’t vary. Judges should give similar sentences in similar cases, underwriters should find the same expected risks from…
Read MoreCT hospitals losing ground on social responsibility
Eight Connecticut hospitals received A grades this year for social responsibility from the Lown Institute, down from twelve last year. No Connecticut hospitals were in Lown’s or US News’ top 20 hospitals in the US. Griffin Hospital ranked #157 in Lown’s composite ranking this year among 3606 US hospitals, the best in Connecticut. Last year…
Read MoreCT ranks 3rd in health system performance, but there’s lots of work to do
Connecticut’s health system performance is the third best in the nation, according to the latest Commonwealth Fund State Scorecard. COVID strongly influenced state’s performance; Connecticut ranked tenth among states on seven measures including COVID mortality, health system stress, and vaccination rates. There is a lot of room for improvement in Connecticut’s health system. Sadly, Connecticut…
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