A Haven in the City

An article in the Yale Journal of Public Health describes HAVEN, a Saturday morning free primary care clinic providing care to residents of the Fairhaven neighborhood in New Haven. HAVEN was conceived by and is staffed by students from Yale’s medical, public health, physician assistant and nursing schools and is held at the Fair Haven…

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CT family premiums grew by 21% from 2001 to 2005; median income grew by 2.4%

A new report explains why CT families are feeling like they are moving backward. “Squeezed: How Costs for Insuring Families are Outpacing Income” by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found while the percent of premium that CT families pay dropped slightly from 2001 to 2005, total average family premium payments increased 6.4%. In more bad…

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Highlights from CT Health Notes

Thursday’s issue of CT Health Notes, our biweekly list serv, includesAging baby boomers intensify looming health care workforce shortage — a new report from the Institute of Medicine finds that the growing number of older patients with more complex health care needs will overwhelm an already stressed health care workforce.Health care becoming “employer of last…

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Donaghue Foundation Annual Meeting & Conference

Wednesday, I went to the Donaghue Foundation Annual Meeting and Conference. The Donaghue Foundation was established to “promote medical knowledge which will be of practical benefit to the preservation, maintenance and improvement of human life.” Three very different projects were highlighted. The first panelist, Harlan Krumholz, MD (Yale School of Medicine) presented on a project…

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New report details questions and answers on implementing medical interpretation for CT Medicaid consumers

A new report, Medicaid Payments for Medical Interpreters: Implementation Questions and Recommended Action, commissioned by the CT Health Foundation lays out details the state needs to consider in implementing legislation passed last year providing medical interpretation services to Medicaid consumers. Questions addressed include how much should DSS pay and to whom, in what situations will…

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Life expectancy drops for women in 183 US counties

From 1983 to 1999 life expectancy in many US counties decreased, especially for women (183 counties) while life expectancy for all Americans grew by 7 years for men and 6 years for women from 1960 to 2000. The last time US life expectancy experienced any decline was in the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic. The authors…

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Retail medical clinic issue brief

Connecticut now has at least fifteen retail medical clinics, mainly Minute Clinics in CVS stores, but more are coming. Go to our Policymaker Issue Brief No. 44 for more on what these clinics are, their potential as an affordable source of care, concerns about safety and impact on the rest of the health care system,…

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CA to review thousands of insurance policy cancellations after consumers get sick, New CT law prohibits this practice

The LA Times reports that the CA Dept. of Managed Health Care will be reviewing thousands of cancelled individual policies looking for cases where coverage was cancelled after patients have become ill, despite paying premiums for years. The insurers cancel policies citing errors by consumers on insurance applications, often completed years earlier and often honest…

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Desperate Measures

Yesterday, I was catching up with a friend of mine who lives in Memphis when she told me about the beginning of her week: On Sunday, my friend, Meredith, went to introduce her newborn daughter to some friends who run a gym. She ran in for five minutes and, by the time she returned to…

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Yale School of Nursing Bellos Lecture — A fresh view of racial and ethnic disparities

This year’s Sybil Bellos Lecture at the Yale School of Nursing, given today by Harvard’s David Williams, PhD, MPH, focused on racial and ethnic disparities as a social construct. His talk titled “Social Sources of Disparities: Patterns, Causes and Interventions” compiled a wealth of research from disparate sources providing a different interpretation of the issue.…

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