Healthcare
Dan Yorke just had Warwick City Councilman Steve Merolla on to talk about why the City of Warwick has eschewed an additional $1 million in cost-savings by deciding to stay with Blue Cross/Blue Shield instead the cheaper United Healthcare as manager of the City’s employee healthcare plan. (The “manager” distinction is important–Warwick pays its own…
Blogger Mickey Kaus calls a news item directly impacting multiple blog-topics a “harmonic convergence” of issues. I think it’s fair to consider this news from Wal-Mart a harmonic convergence within the Rhode Island blogosphere…Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., intends to contract with local hospitals and other organizations to open as many as 400 in-store health clinics over…
I’m not commenting on the veracity of either side’s claims, as reported by Karen Lee Ziner in today’s Projo. I’m just pointing out that if United Healthcare decides to drop St. Joseph’s and Our Lady of Fatima hospitals from its provider network, the average United customer has no recourse, because of the way that health…
Froma Harrop calls attention to the problem that “Anchor Babies” (some consider the term to be a perjorative, incidentally) pose for immigration reform and enforcement. Pregnant women routinely arrive in the United States in time to give birth and thereby obtain Social Security numbers for their babies — and with them, permanent entrée into American…
I have to examine the numbers more carefully before commenting on the overall plan, but this part of Rhode Island’s new small business healthcare plan, as described by Felice J. Freyer in yesterday’s Projo, seems troubling…You pay through the nose — $200 per visit — if you go to a hospital emergency room with a…
Lawrence Purtill’s education aid op-ed isn’t the only recent Projo op-ed guilty of trying to convince people that a contradictory set of recommendations can be combined into sound public policy. In last Thursday’s Projo, Dr. Joseph Chazan presented this dud of a suggestion for containing healthcare costs in Rhode Island…Government controls and regulators should recruit…
The inclusion of this item in Senator Tom Coburn’s national healthcare proposal…Keeping Medicaid on mission: The bill liberates the poor from substandard government care and offers states the option to provide their Medicaid beneficiaries the kind of health care coverage that wealthier Americans enjoy. The bill creates incentives for states to achieve private universal coverage…
Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma has introduced major healthcare reform legislation into the U.S. Senate. Kimberley Strassel had a short summary of the proposal in last week’s OpinionJournal…[Senator Coburn’s proposal] would remove the subsidy corporations get for health care, and instead give the money to individuals–putting them in charge of their health expenditures. It would…
For a while now, I have been hearing that the inefficient delivery of routine healthcare, especially through the over-use of emergency rooms, is a primary source of America’s runaway healthcare costs. If this is true, CVS’ proposal to place “MinuteClinics”, staffed by a nurse practitioner, in a number of their stores, should at least an…
According to Felice J. Freyer in today’s Projo, just about everyone in Rhode Island not on the United Healthcare payroll, including most of the state’s healthcare providers, Attorney General Patrick Lynch, and Governor Donald Carcieri, opposes United’s attempt to transfer $36.8 million from RI to their parent company in Minnesota…United is seeking state permission to…