Healthy Howard, a nonprofit organization that is funded by the HoCo government to the tune of $500,000, is not achieving its goal of signing up 2200 people for subsidized access to health insurance. So far, the program has signed up around 65 people among over 1100 applicants to the program. This is mainly due to the fact that the applicants unwittingly qualify for state and federal programs that do the same thing as Healthy Howard.
To save their face, relevance, and funding, the county is working on Healthy Howard's behalf to appeal to five different groups of people that they think may qualify for the program - and therefore get them to some kind of reasonable roll of participants.
Dr. Peter Beilenson, the county health officer, admitted that if participation remains low after this year that it may be time to rethink the program. Absolutely right and I'm happy to see that he doesn't want to just blow the $500K for the sake of a program that may not work.
While access to health care insurance is an important public health issue, it's really just the tip of the iceburg. The county could better use that $500,000 to address other public health issues, such as incentivizing general practice doctors, encouraging a move to patient-accessible electonic health records, or driving down the cost of medical malpractice insurance.
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In the recent Obama speech (aired c-span this am) he mentioned nationwide electronically stored medical records.
ReplyDeleteHe has great ideas - hope he can put them into practice.
A favorite: build wind and solar plants while providing jobs to people who'll buy cars and pay on their mortgages, resulting in energy independence.
Win-win-win-win