LBCC Healthcare Review of Concepts Dimensions Measures & Progress Discussion

We have a health care crisis because doctors, patients, employers and employees are trapped in a wasteful, broken system that is too bureaucratic and far too unresponsive to patient needs and market forces. To solve our problems, doctor needs the opportunity to produce higher-quality, less-costly care. As a patient, we need access to services we are not now getting. At the workplace, we need access to health insurance that costs less and gives us more.

Discussion Question

Reflect on your own attitude toward these issues. Using the framework from your reading, class discussion and additional research for this week, analyze and try to explain your position. Min WC: 350

The fact that millions of Americans do not have health insurance is said to be a major problem, if not the major problem, of the United State health care system. Estimates of the number who are uninsured vary widely. There are also widely different indicators of how much difference uninsurance makes. One of the strange features of the U.S. health care system is that the health plan most of us have is not a plan that we chose; rather, it was selected by our employer. Even if we like our health plan, we could easily lose coverage because of the loss of a job, a change in employment, or a decision by our employer.

Most employer health insurance contracts last only twelve months. At the end of the year, the employer may choose a different health plan or cease providing health insurance altogether. Strangely, the only people with private health insurance guaranteed to last longer than one year are people who purchase insurance on their own. A switch of health plans might mean changing doctors as well, if the two plans do not have overlapping networks or if cost-sharing arrangements penalize the patient’s previous choice of doctors. If an employee (or family member) has a health problem, that could interrupt the continuity of care. In addition, different plans have different benefit packages. So some services, such as mental health, might be covered by one plan but not the next.

These disruptions affect some families more than others. For people who are healthy, they amount to minor inconveniences; for others, the problems can be severe. One study of chronically ill workers found that relying on one’s employer for health coverage reduced job mobility 40 percent. Older workers, who are more likely than younger workers to have health problems, are also disproportionately affected. Further, as more employers cut back on postretirement health care benefits, many baby-boomer early retirees will have to shop for individual insurance and pay for it with after-tax dollars. The same fate will confront many younger spouses of retirees who enroll in Medicare.

Discussion Question

What is your approach to determine an action that can resolve these problems in our system? Can we have one without the other? WC MINIMUM 350

Must post first.

Vaccines, which save millions of lives every year, are one of the most successful public health interventions in the history of modern medicine. Among the diseases that they prevent is the whooping cough, nimonia, malaria, polio and many more. Why, then, is that sickness making a scary comeback globally; especially in California which is currently weathering its largest whooping-cough epidemic since 1947, with over 7,800 cases and 10 deaths in 2010? Mainly because more and more parents, worried about the vaccine’s supposed side effects, are choosing to delay vaccinating their children — or not to do it at all, says Paul Howard and James R. Copland, director of the Center for Medical Progress and director of the Center for Legal Policy at the Manhattan Institute, respectively.

This public health calamity comes at a time when the Supreme Court is considering a lawsuit against whooping cough vaccine manufacturer Wyeth. If successful, the suit would make epidemics much more likely and undermine public confidence in vaccines even further.

• Parental concerns about vaccine safety are mostly wrongheaded.
• Plaintiffs’ lawyers, eager to translate junk science into jury awards, have long spread misinformation about the dangers of vaccination.
• They’ve been especially successful among the affluent and well-educated, presumably because those groups have greater access to vaccine pseudoscience.
• Last October, the National Committee for Quality Assurance issued a report finding that vaccination rates among privately insured two-year-olds declined by nearly 4 percent in 2009 — even as rates among enrollees in Medicaid increased.
• In fact, 91.2 percent of children in Medicaid received the measles-mumps-rubella vaccination, compared with 90.6 percent of children in private plans.

In California’s wealthy Marin County, public health official Fred Schwartz reports that parents are “signing waivers to opt out of immunizing kindergarten-bound children.” About 7 percent of all children entering kindergarten in Marin County are unvaccinated, the seventh-highest percentage among California’s 58 counties. It isn’t surprising, then, that Marin County accounts for 15 percent of all California whooping-cough cases, despite having just 0.67 percent of the state’s population, say Howard and Copeland.

Discussion Question:

What would you do in terms of policy, system and economics to raise the hope of people already concerned about the issues discussed above? WC: 350 Words