Quality of Florida Health Care Studied

A majority of Floridians believe that the state is not providing good medical care to people with disabilities, according to the annual Sunshine State Survey results released Tuesday.
Susan MacManus, the survey director and University of South Florida political scientist,  said concerns over health care for the state’s most vulnerable received some of the most negative findings.

Rankings of Most Livable Cities

When searching for a new city to call home, most people share a common list of priorities — affordability, jobs, schools and attractions among them. But people with disabilities often have a larger list of considerations. Factors such as the accessibility of various facilities, the quality of health care and even the cleanliness of the air can take precedence over others. The availability of such elements allows them to play an important role in the community and make significant contributions to the economy.

What Health Care Can and Should Look Like for Individuals with IDD

The world came together in Los Angeles last month at the Special Olympics World Summer Games in an amazing international celebration of abilities and possibilities.
It was the ideal place and time for the Golisano Foundation to announce that our founder, Tom Golisano would commit $25 million to expand Special Olympics Healthy Communities, a successful initiative we helped launch three years ago to enhance global access to healthcare and improve health outcomes for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Doctors Unprepared to Treat Patients with Autism, Study Finds

A new survey finds many health care providers admittedly know little about how to care for adults with autism.

Of 922 providers surveyed, 77 percent rated their ability to treat patients on the spectrum as poor or fair.

Iowa Official Fears 'Disaster' with Move to Medicaid Managed Care

Iowa Senate President Pam Jochum said Thursday she's worried that vulnerable Iowans face a "disaster" as the state implements a cost-saving plan to hire a private business to manage the Medicaid health insurance program.
Jochum, a Dubuque Democrat who has an adult daughter with severe developmental disabilities, said her family has the financial resources to care for her daughter if necessary. But she feels obligated to speak on behalf of other Iowa families who don't have enough money to care for their loved ones if Medicaid services aren't available.

N.J. Human Services Chief Leaving Post

Jennifer Velez, credited by policy analysts and healthcare advocates with expertly handling some of the biggest Medicaid changes in New Jersey’s history, is ending her eight-year run as state human services commissioner.

Her tenure was marked by an ability to balance competing demands under governors from both major political parties, and reshaping Medicaid as well as non-healthcare programs affecting the state’s children.

States Watch 2015 Health Care Issues

Much of the health-care conversations this year will concentrate on two issues with major budgetary and insurance coverage implications that Governing has previously covered. Those are the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court decision that could end federal subsidies in the 30-some states that don’t operate their own exchange, making insurance unaffordable for many, and whether Congress reauthorizes the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which covers 8 million kids from low-income families through state and federal funding.

Unfortunately for states, those are also both issues over which they have little control. There are, however, several other areas to watch over which states do have greater control and still others worth keeping an eye on where federal policymakers remain in the driver’s seat.

An Oasis of Care and Caring

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — A mother needs to get her son out the door. Thick white socks cover his contorted feet, a coat drapes his twisted shoulders, a water bottle with a straw nestles in the concave of his chest, and black straps on his wheelchair secure his wrists. He is 33 years old, and she has to get him to an appointment.

“I always forget something,” the mother, Mimi Kramer, says, looking about her small, immaculate house. “Oh. A change of pants, just in case.”
Her son, Trey, has intellectual disability, autism and cerebral palsy. He was a joy as a child, she says, but with puberty came violent acts of frustration: biting himself until he bleeds, raging against sounds as faint as a fork scrape on a plate, lashing out with his muscular right arm. He nearly bit her finger off one Kentucky Derby Day when she tried to swipe away foam that he had gnawed from his wheelchair’s armrest. 

But he’ll also definitely make you smile when he’s happy,” says Ms. Kramer, 52, a slight, divorced woman who has raised her son mostly alone. “His smile will light up the room.”

Connecticut Medical Homes Improving Medicaid Care Coordination

The use of nationally certified medical homes to coordinate the care of Connecticut's Medicaid patients has led to improved quality, a 2 percent cut in per person costs, and a 32 percent increase in the number of participating providers during an 18-month period.
The news comes as the state moves forward with plans to jumpstart the medical home movement in Connecticut with an expanded "Glide Path" program that would assist all practices – not just those that accept Medicaid patients – working to become medical homes. The program, still under development, would require practices to meet national standards.

Study: Some with Autism Diagnosis Can Recover

What do you think of the findings from this study? Really eager to hear from you.

Doctors have long believed that disabling autistic disorders last a lifetime, but a new study has found that some children who exhibit signature symptoms of the disorder recover completely.

The study, posted online on Wednesday by the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, is the largest to date of such extraordinary cases and is likely to alter the way that scientists and parents think and talk about autism, experts said.

Florida Seeks to Overturn Autism Ruling

MIAMI, Fla. -- Already facing sharp criticism over policies that have resulted in the rationing of care to severely disabled children, Florida healthcare regulators are challenging a federal judge's order that the state provide a costly -- but potentially life-changing -- treatment to children with autism.
Last spring, U.S. District Judge Joan Lenard struck down the state's refusal to pay for applied behavior analysis (ABA) for autistic children, calling the state's policy "arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable."

Read more here: http://www.bradenton.com/2013/01/06/4341212/faced-with-a-judges-order-that.html#storylink=cpy

Higher Payments May Prompt More New Jersey Doctors to Accept Medicaid Patients

A two-year project is under way to encourage primary care doctors to accept Medicaid-eligible patients by paying for many services at the same level as Medicare.
Many poor or disabled patients have limited access to healthcare because so few doctors have been willing to accept the low Medicaid reimbursement rates.
The federal government will cover the difference between Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements for 146 primary-care services from Jan. 1 through the end of 2014. The increased payments will be made to family physicians, pediatricians and internal medicine doctors who specialize in primary care.

Brain-Injured Suffer Major Treatment Gap

Larry Boswell sat slumped in a wheelchair. His sweatpants were soiled, his T-shirt soaked in saliva. Flies buzzed around his head.

He was able to walk when he arrived at Illinois’ Cobden Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in 2008, government records show, something he can’t manage now. Speech therapy for the 57- year-old ended shortly after he was admitted, according to a lawyer trying to persuade Medicaid to transfer him.
While much of what Boswell says is incomprehensible, he managed a clear “no” when asked if he wanted to stay where he was. Cobden officials didn’t respond to telephone calls.
Boswell is one of nearly 244,000 brain-injured people consigned to nursing homes, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from U.S. Medicare and Medicaid statistics. He’s also on the front line in a national battle to get people like him out of facilities that aren’t equipped to care for them.

Autistic Aduts Report Worse Health Care

Adults with autism report significantly worse health care experiences than adults without autism, according to a study published in the November issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
Christina Nicolaidis, MD, MPH, of the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, and colleagues used a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach to adapt a survey for adults with autism. The online cross-sectional survey was completed by 209 adults with autism whose health care experiences were compared with those of 228 adults without autism.

Autistic Kids 9 Times More Likely to Have ER Visit

BALTIMORE -- New research has found that children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are nine times more likely to be at a hospital emergency room for psychiatric reasons.
The study found that severe behaviors tied to aggression were the leading cause of emergency visits among autistic children.
The researchers also found that the likelihood of a psychiatric emergency room visit was higher if a child carried private health insurance rather than medical assistance.

This Election, a Stark Choice in Health Care

Joyce Beck, who runs a small hospital and network of medical clinics in rural Nebraska, is reluctant to plan for the future until voters decide between President Obama and Mitt Romney. The candidates’ sharply divergent proposals for Medicare, Medicaid and coverage of the uninsured have created too much uncertainty, she explained. 

“We are all on hold, waiting to see what the election brings,” said Ms. Beck, chief executive of Thayer County Health Services in Hebron, Neb. 

When Americans go to the polls next month, they will cast a vote not just for president but for one of two profoundly different visions for the future of the country’s health care system.

Romney Champions Medicaid in Ohio with No Mention of Proposal for Severe Cuts

Feeling a little political this morning, will try to provide a proper balance.

During a rally in Mt. Vernon, Ohio on Wednesday, Mitt Romney touted the benefits of Medicaid and claimed that all Americans will be able to obtain health care insurance without President Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
Responding to a question from a woman whose son suffers from Spina Bifida, Romney disparaged Obama’s health care measure — which would expand access to 30 million Americans — and claimed that the law is unnecessary for people suffering from chronic conditions:

ROMNEY: Actually, we had health care in America before Obamacare came along. And we still have health care in America…Each of us today in America has a choice of the type of health care plan we might choose. People who are poor are able to get Medicaid, which is a government support effort for those who can’t afford to have insurance. And these things aren’t going to disappear without Obamacare.

N.J. Senator Focuses on Relocating Residents

More than 500 disabled individuals will need new homes as the state closes its Totowa and Woodbridge developmental centers over the next five years.

Sen. Loretta Weinberg wants to make sure that in planning for those relocations, the state Division of Developmental Disabilities takes into account lessons learned from earlier developmental center closures.

Toward that end, Weinberg has introduced legislation to require a study of how several hundred former residents of the North Princeton Developmental Center fared after it was closed in 1998.

The Arkansas Innovation

Mention medical innovation, and you might think of the biotech corridor around Boston, or the profusion of companies developing wireless medical technologies in San Diego. But one of the most important hotbeds of new approaches to medicine is … you didn’t guess it: Arkansas.
The state has a vision for changing the way Arkansans pay for health care. It is moving toward ending “fee-for-service” payments, in which each procedure a patient undergoes for a single medical condition is billed separately. Instead, the costs of all the hospitalizations, office visits, tests and treatments will be rolled into one “episode-based” or “bundled” payment. “In three to five years,” John M. Selig, the head of Arkansas’s Department of Human Services, told me, “we aspire to have 90 to 95 percent of all our medical expenditures off fee-for-service.”

Penn Medicine Breaks Silence on Heart Transplant Denial for Autistic Patient

Penn Medicine is part of the Hospital
of the University of Pennsylvania.

Much of the coverage devoted to Paul Corby’s quest to get a heart transplant has focused on the cardiac and transplant side of things. But Paul, of Pottsville, PA hasn’t been denied placement on the heart transplant list for cardiac reasons.
Paul has been denied placement on the heart transplant list, at least in part, because he has autism.
Paul, who has a rare congenital heart disorder called Left Ventricular Noncompaction (LVN), has had three mini-strokes already. He’s 23 years old. His father died of a stroke, caused by the same disease, at age 27.  Penn Medicine at Radnor, part of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, denied Paul placement on the heart transplant list in part because Paul is autistic.
A letter from a Penn Medicine transplant doctor to Paul’s mother, Karen Corby, reads, “I have recommended against a transplant given his psychiatric issues, autism, the complexity of the process, multiple procedures and the unknown and unpredictable effect of steroids on behavior."