Throwing More Money at Healthy Howard Access Plan

The Healthy Howard Access Plan is a plan that helps individuals or families gain access to comprehensive health insurance and health coaching. The plan fees run on a scale with income and can run from $50 to $115 per month. According to this Baltimore Sun report, to date, the County has 200 people enrolled in the program and 250 pending applications for an unknown number of people. That currently is less than 10% of the stated year one goal of enrolling 2200 people in the program.

Around 2500 other folks that have enrolled in the service have been referred to other programs at the state and national level that could help them instead. Many of them are children.

The County has not met its enrollment goals for the program, but combining referrals and health coaching to encourage proactive health monitoring may save the County lots of money over time.

Also, there is a $500,000 grant from the Horizon Foundation for the program that is yet unspent.

These are the facts that framed the County Council debate on spending another half million dollars on the program for FY2010. Councilman Greg Fox opposed that amount of money and sought to cut the funding by half given the program's enrollment challenges. He was soundly defeated.

Fox's message resonates with my feeling that Healthy Howard could do wonders for the county as a public health awareness program. It can achieve its goals by being a combination of a referral service and a program that educates the HoCo public about the importance of not being reactionary when it comes to health. The combination will help prevent very expensive emergency room visits, skipping out on those bills, and having that cost passed on to the insured in the County.

Healthy Howard does not have to be a gateway to local insurance plans. It can be effective with the stated mission above and not have to spend $1 million this year to do it.

Healthy Howard Might Need A New Direction

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.

Forum on Fed Health Care Policy

I wasn't able to make the forum tonight that Exec Ulman is holding on federal health care policy - per the suggestion of the incoming Obama administration. I would have liked to have gone, but couldn't make it. Can anyone that went send me some notes of what was discussed? Particularly, I'd like to hear if anyone discussed how the Healthy Howard Access Plan hasn't worked well at all and how it should probably be transformed into a debt forgiveness program to encourage general practice doctors in the County.

You can drop me a line here.