quality
Primary care spending boost and capitation didn’t work in private plans either
The big idea circulating in some CT health policy circles to control the costs of healthcare is to boost primary care with tons of money and capitate provider payments. Primary care is regular health care for prevention, like check-ups, and common health problems. A new study finds that the idea failed in private insurance, as…
Read MoreOp-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 MoreCTNJ Analysis: Another CT healthcare story of wasted money and missed opportunities
An excellent investigative piece by C-HIT published Tuesday found that the state Office of Health Strategy has squandered $20 million in federal funds and delayed for years a key health improvement system that could be protecting our health today. The C-HIT investigation took the better part of a year, encountered serious roadblocks from OHS, and…
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 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 MoreYale BIPOC disability group seeking members with lived experience
The Disability Lived Experience Action Network, D-LEAN, is seeking people who identify as BIPOC with disabilities – mental, intellectual, or developmental. D-LEAN is sponsored by the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health and funded by the Connecticut Council on Developmental Disabilities. D-LEAN is looking for leaders or emerging leaders. Members will learn about the…
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…
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