Jul 9 2013
Patient advocates are urging greater oversight of the private programs. In other news, a Philadelphia couple details their struggle to get health insurance for their son.
Kaiser Health News: Advocates Urge More Government Oversight Of Medicaid Managed Care
When the federal government recently gave Florida the green light to vastly expand its experiment with privatizing Medicaid, patient advocates quickly raised an alarm. They cited serious problems with the state's five-county pilot managed care program and urged close monitoring of the companies that run private Medicaid plans to ensure that they don't scrimp on care (Bergal, 7/5).
Philadelphia Inquirer: How Baby Erik Got Insurance
Two days after Erik Friedman was born, his parents applied for coverage under Pennsylvania's universal Children's Health Insurance Program. Six months later, they got it. What happened in between were 86 phone calls, two lost applications, a calculation error that tripled their income (and raised their premium), incorrect advice that they should (and did) drop their baby's catastrophic health insurance to qualify, multiple promises of responses that never came, and collection agency letters for hospital bills, which, of course, hadn't been paid (Sapatkin, 7/8).
|
 This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
|
Study: 71% of US grocery store baby food products are ultra-processed