$50 million health coverage opportunity for CT from national health reform

CT can access $50 million in federal funds to cover state residents with pre-existing conditions until 2014 when insurers will no longer be able to exclude adults from coverage because they have health problems. Under the law, insurers are prohibited from excluding children with pre-existing conditions from coverage this year. Since 1975, CT has had…

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SustiNet medical home committee making progress

At last week’s SustiNet Patient-Centered Medical Home committee meeting we heard about medical home initiatives in the two programs that will form the basis of SustiNet, the state employee plan and Medicaid/HUSKY. Tom Woodruff of the Comptroller’s Office presented on the state employee plan’s medical home initiative. The state will be moving to a self-insured…

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Predictably Irrational author comes to CT

Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape our Decisions, spoke at Wednesday’s Donaghue Foundation annual meeting in Farmington. How choices are framed has a lot to do with how we respond. For example, a group of people were asked to name either 3 or 10 reasons they love their significant other.…

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The Treatment Trap author visits CT

I had already ordered her book online after reading a review in Health Affairs when I got an invitation to hear Rosemary Gibson, author of the Treatment Trap: How the Overuse of Medical Care is Wrecking Your Health and What You Can Do to Prevent It. Her visit yesterday was hosted by AARP-CT and the…

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Smoking bans slowly move to private clubs

The 2003 state law prohibiting smoking in restaurants and bars exempted private clubs. In 2007 the Supreme Court upheld the law in a challenge filed by a few bar owners. When the law passed, many believed that private clubs would become more popular as sanctuaries for smokers. However, according to yesterday’s Hartford Courant, a growing…

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Myths and truths in national health reform

There has been a lot of misinformation about the new national health reform bill and what it will mean for Connecticut. Rumors include 16,500 new armed IRS agents to enforce the individual mandate, Medicare cuts, skyrocketing premiums and budget deficits. We’ve collected twenty of them, some true and some false, from calls to CT’s Congressional…

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BHP initiative reduces hospital delay days by 22% in two years

At Wednesday’s Behavioral Health Partnership Oversight Council meeting, Value Options, DCF, DSS and eight hospitals announced remarkable progress in reducing the number of HUSKY children in discharge delay at hospitals, ready to leave but waiting for appropriate outpatient behavioral health care. The initiative aligned performance incentives across providers and administrators. During 2007, before the initiative,…

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House passes budget mitigation plan

Yesterday the House approved a plan to address the $371 million deficit in this year’s state budget. The Senate will vote on the plan today and the Governor is expected to sign it. The bill includes freezing subsidized enrollments in the Charter Oak program at the end of this month; consumers paying full cost will…

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Foundation working to get health reform truth out

The Universal Health Care Foundation of CT announced yesterday a public awareness campaign to help people in CT understand the benefits of national and state health care reforms and to counter substantial misinformation efforts by opponents of reform. Speakers pointed out that 150 volunteers have been working for months researching and designing CT’s health system…

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eHealthCT wins federal grant for health IT training

This week eHealthConnecticut announced their application for $5.7 million in federal stimulus money was approved. The funding is to create a training center for CT health care providers implementing electronic health records. eHealthCT joins a network of sixty similar training centers across the nation. Electronic health records are a long overdue innovation in medicine that…

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