COMMENTARY: Yes, Americans die for lack of health insurance
Barbara Shelly
Poor Mitt Romney. In trying to be all things to all people on health care, he's found himself stuck in a time warp.
The Republican presidential nominee, supposedly a new man after his sparkling debate performance, has not completely abandoned his clueless ways, as he revealed in an interview last week with the editorial board of the Columbus Dispatch.
While discussing the U.S. health-care system, Romney amazingly and wrongly said that Americans don't die for lack of health insurance.
"We don't have a setting across this country where if you don't have insurance, we just say to you, 'Tough luck, you're going to die when you have your heart attack'," he said.
"No, you go to the hospital, you get treated, you get care, and it's paid for, either by charity, the government or by the hospital. We don't have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don't have insurance."
Oh yes we do, Romney. This nation has millions of people who become ill because they can't afford preventive medicine. We have sick people who can't get well because they can't afford medications. We have people who live in pain because they can't pay for treatments.
And yes, Romney, we have people who die sooner than they should because they don't have insurance. Different studies have placed the number from 18,000 to nearly 45,000 people a year.
Brunswick hospital officials deny attempts to ‘extinguish’ competitor
Posted Oct. 16, 2012, at 5:42 p.m.
BRUNSWICK, Maine — Mid Coast Hospital officials Monday denied they want to consolidate with Parkview Adventist Medical Center to “extinguish” the competing hospital.
Speaking to a packed conference room at Mid Coast Hospital, officials laid out the hospital’s proposal as a plan to heal and strengthen health care in the community — and to save $24.3 million a year.
Mid Coast’s offer came after Central Maine Healthcare, the parent company of Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston, filed a Certificate of Need on Aug. 29 to take over Parkview. Mid Coast subsequently filed its own Certificate of Need on Sept. 19 to merge with Parkview.
The Maine Department of Health and Human Services will hold a public hearing on Central Maine Healthcare’s proposal at 10 a.m., Oct. 24, at the Knights of Columbus building, 2 Columbus Drive.
On Monday, Lois Skillings, president and chief executive officer of Mid Coast Health Services, appealed for support for Mid Coast’s competing proposal.
She said two hospitals are too many for a small community like Brunswick, in a state that is paying 25 percent more for health care than the federal average. She said 44 percent of all beds at Mid Coast and Parkview are empty.
“This excess capacity is what’s costing our community $24 million extra … every year in delivering health care,” Skillings said. “We feel by coming together, actually diminishing the beds in our region, we can improve that utilization rate and the better we can improve in health, the less need there will be for in-patient beds in the future as well.”
For health care to work in the future, she said, three things simultaneously need to happen: the health of the population needs to improve, health care itself must improve — switching its focus to preventative care, in particular – and the per capita cost of care needs to fall.
“The rising cost of health care is breaking the back of our economy,” Skillings said, “and we can no longer afford the duplicated waste and expense that has gotten ourselves into this position in the first place.”
Parkview officials did not attend Monday’s forum. But in a newspaper advertisement published over the weekend, the hospital said it has repeatedly said “no” to proposals by Mid Coast, and that people deserve a choice of hospitals.
‘Most expensive’ patients eyed for better hospital care, lower costs
Posted Oct. 16, 2012, at 6:07 p.m.
When former emergency physician Lisa Letourneau thinks about wasteful health care spending, one Maine woman with a stomachache comes to mind.
The woman, who suffered from anxiety and failed to take her medication, repeatedly showed up at one of the state’s hospitals worried about her stomach pain. Hospital staff, focused on getting patients in and out quickly, kept ordering more CAT scans of the woman’s abdomen to diagnose the problem.
By the end of the year, the patient had undergone 30 scans, which typically cost at least $2,000 each and also emit radiation that poses a cancer risk.
The woman is what’s known in the health care world as a “superutilizer” — a patient who makes frequent trips to the emergency department or returns for repeated hospital stays. Those patients are considered a major factor in skyrocketing health care costs across the country.
Hospital services are often the most expensive form of treatment and can fall short in addressing many patients’ needs, particularly people with chronic illnesses.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the nation’s largest charitable organization focused on public health, has launched a nationwide campaign to identify and better care for superutilizers. The foundation recently announced Maine Quality Counts, a regional health care collaborative headed by Letourneau, as one of six recipients across the country to each receive a $200,000 grant under the initiative.
Maine Quality Counts has in turn chosen MaineGeneral Health, one of eight health care teams in the state that’s already working with the collaborative to address the neediest and most expensive patients, to take the lead on the grant. Doctors in Kennebec County will develop a model for identifying and caring for those patients that eventually will shape a statewide strategy.
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