Health care is local, according to Secretary Sebelius. It's also personal.
Health care is, broadly speaking a local good, just like Senator Tip O'Neill used to say about politics: that "all politics is local." Secretary of Health and Human Kathlees Sebelius launched the website The Heatlh Care Status Quo on the HealthReform.Gov portal, profiling each of the 50 States and their current level of health care and "need for health reform," according to the Secretary.
We learn about a medical bankruptcy case in South Florida through the eyes of Dorothy Carmone, a self-employed cancer patient. Health care for Dorothy, and for all of us, is personal.
Each state profile details level of insured and uninsured, percent of incomes spent on health care, health status (e.g., % obesity), health plan competition, access to care and services, and other metrics.
Based on these data, the "hot point" is summarized in terms of, "Why (Fill-in-the-State-Name) Needs Health Reform."
Health Populi's Hot Points: The DHHS and President Obama's team have entered the Health Reform PR Wars. While for the short-term, Michael Jackson's death and other celebrity news items have filled the airwaves and public mindshare, the lobbying efforts on all sides of health reform will heat up after the Congressional recess. This website is one aspect of the Health Reform Reality Show.
As a data junkie and industry analyst, I love the site. Many health policy wonks will. The level of detail is useful and well-researched. However, I'm not sure it's going to resonate with many health citizens for whom, as Tip said, "health care is local."
Health care is not just local -- it's personal. In the Stakeholder Discussions tab under "Forums," you can find reports from in-person meetings held around the U.S. What would resonate with Real People would be online discussions where people could leave their personal, up-close-and-personal, 360-degree stories about their experiences with the U.S. health system. These stories would together piece the patchwork quilt of Participatory Healthcare: patients' voices from around the nation stating their case, filling in the blanks that policymakers seem blind to. Or constrained by the lobbying fray =--- the fear of the camel's nose -- whatever.
The Health Status Quo is that The American People -- the health citizen, health consumer, caregiver, sick child, young adult with cancer -- still aren't integrated into policy. We won't get to person-centered care that works for all until we're woven into the fabric of policy.
posted by Jane Sarasohn-Kahn at
6:44 AM
2 Comments:
Hopefully that will improve health for all on this, the government must give force to the health sector, as there are many people who suffer from chronic illnesses and who need help to cover expenses stronger as fibromyalgia, cancer, producing a series very heavy cost to those who suffer as they must take powerful drugs such as oxycodone, Vicodin, Lortab, drugs that are highly controlled and that findrxonline indicate that opioids are very strong and anxiolytics do not know if that can be given life-threatening that consumes, that is why many times the costs are too high to be able to obtain and soothe the intense pain.
By
Pain chronic, At
June 30, 2009 3:17 PM
Thank you for shining a light in a dark corner that policy makers seem to forget these days. No matter what they come up with, the question of complexity in simply navigating the disparate entities that make up our health system, the amount of time and confusion in understanding the relationship of those disparate entities to one another, and what that means to each consumer as an individual whether sick or healthy doesn't seem to be taken into account.
We can insure everyone in the country and still cost ourselves billions in time and productivity because as consumers we can't find our way through the maze we've created. Technology is supposed to help drive costs down, but here's the rub... clinical information exchange is fine for the inside of healthcare, but let's take some of the cost burden off ourselves and our employers or other plan sponsors in just trying to figure out the phone number for the physicians in my plan, or which providers are taking new patients without having to play dialing for dollars. I could go on and on here...
I hope that soon we'll find our representatives stripping off their political suits and standing in nothing but their consumer bodies. Maybe then they will see that so many of the decisions they are making leave the void you reference.
By
Lilian, At
June 30, 2009 5:06 PM
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