Lown Institute/ Right Care Alliance 2016 Conference

I am back from the annual Lown Institute/ Right Care Alliance meeting in Chicago.  A considerable part of the meeting was devoted to issues that may be familiar to readers of Health Care Renewal.

Shannon Brownlee, in her keynote talk, "Introducing the Right Care Alliance," called our current US health care system "corrupt."  She noted how clinical research has been "hijacked," (see our posts on the suppression and manipulation of clinical research).  She noted how the multi-million dollar compensation of CEOs whose hospitals serve - not always well - primarily poor people (see our posts on executive compensation and mission-hostile management).  She called for a national conversation to "expose the dark matter" of medicine, and right the wrongs of a new "gilded age."

The Right Care Alliance has a Vision Statement which calls for health care in which

Healthcare is a right, not a commodified privilege, and access to healthcare is universal, equitable, and affordable. Everybody in, nobody out.

There is meaningful public transparency around costs and outcomes that matter to patients and communities.

The science and practice of medicine is free of commercial bias and the profit motive.

among other imperatives.

Not to toot our own horns too much, but Dr Adriane Fugh-Berman of PharmedOut.org and I led a workshop on deceptive pharmaceutical and device promotion in the context of health care corruption.

Hopefully, much of the conference content will eventually show up on the web, but so far one nice video summary has been produced:

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United Healthcare Leaving the Obamacare Exchanges Is Not the Point––What's Happening to the People Who Have No Choice But to Buy Their Health Insurance Under Obamacare Is

Comments in a recent Politico article over United HealthCare's pullout from the Obamacare exchanges because of $1 billion in losses have me scratching my head.

"It's a nothingburger in terms of market impact, said insurance industry consultant John Gorman. But symbolically and politically, it's huge" He went on, "We're only about halfway through the drama of stabilizing these marketplaces.

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The Budget Crisis Impact on Centers for Independent Living

Like many other human services providers, the Illinois Network of Centers for Independent Living
(INCIL) is being hit hard by the Illinois budget crisis. Access Living is one of the 22 Centers for Independent Living (CILs) in Illinois. The CILs serve 95 of the 102 counties in Illinois. INCIL’s Executive Director, Ann Ford, shared the following, based on reports from 19 of the 22 CILs, which employ between 450-500 people:

•39 CIL staff have been laid off state wide since July 1, 2015
•93 CIL staff are working reduced hours because of furlough days, experiencing pay cuts ranging from 20% to 40%
•21 vacant CIL positions remain unfilled throughout the state (delaying hires is one way to save money)
•Two CILs are in the process of closing satellite offices
•All CILs are restricting travel, including in some areas travel to consumers’ homes
•At least four CILs are developing contingency plans to close in the event funding doesn’t come within the next six months
•It is difficult to determine how many consumers have gone without services. A reasonable estimate would be 800 to 1,000 people statewide
•The impact includes the enormous emotional toll this issue is taking on staff at all CILs, as they take on increased workloads while losing a portion of their income.

The CILs are doing the very best they can to continue to provide services to empower people with disabilities to live as independently as possible in the community. Quite often they are a real lifeline for many people with disabilities. During this difficult state budget crisis, know that your local CILs have been doing everything they can to show why their programs matter to the local community. The CILs are still waiting for just over $4 million in FY 16 budget money for CILs from the state of Illinois, as well as other funds specific to certain disability programs they run.

While Access Living has been holding on, we are very concerned about our fellow CILs at risk of closing. Please contact Ann Ford at annford@incil.org if you have questions about the network; you can also check www.incil.org to see what CILs serve your area. We also urge you to contact your Governor, state senators and representatives to urge them to work on a budget solution ASAP so that disability services are not further impacted.

Ann Ford
Executive Director
Illinois Network of Centers for Independent Living 

This was originally shared as an Advocacy Alert from Access Living.

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Selling Health Insurance Across State Lines––A Really Dumb Idea

Any candidate that suggests such a scheme only shows how unsophisticated he and his advisers are when it comes to understanding how the
insurance markets really work––or could work.

I gave a speech to 750 health insurance brokers and consultants in DC last week.

When selling health insurance across state lines, something Trump and a number of other Republican presidential candidates have

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Key Lessons from Health & Medicine’s Budget Forum

On January 15, 2016, Health & Medicine hosted a meeting of The Chicago Forum for Justice in forum proceedings notes as a reference guide for the forum’s content.

Our notes are written as a summary and while they can’t fully capture the presentations, videos of each of the five mini panels are available on the event webpage, as are slides from speakers who used them in their presentations. We thank CAN TV for recording, editing, and sharing videos of the forum, extending the potential impact of our panelists’ presentations.

We hope these notes will be useful for advocates and policymakers seeking to understand issues related to the budget, think about potential revenue solutions, and consider strategies, framing, and narratives likely to advance progress.  Health & Medicine will be convening a small group soon to review the forum proceedings and discuss next steps for our work on this critical area, which we’ll share on our website.

While the budget problems and solutions are more complex than this, here are some main points that have emerged for me from conversations and from the presentations and discussion at the conference:

• Illinois lacks sufficient revenue, which represents a structural budget problem, priming the State to have recurring budget shortages and hampering our ability to provide Illinoisans with the public services they need and want, thus harming the health of the public, and disproportionately harming vulnerable communities.
• The structural budget problems have several potential revenue solutions, including a progressive income tax structure and efforts to ensure corporations pay their fair share, both of which are more equitable than our current system and would better grow revenue in proportion to the size of Illinois’ economy.
• State elected officials are collectively responsible for passing a budget and using a selection of revenue solutions that will help preserve and improve the vital health, social, and education programs and services that support people’s health and Illinois’ economy.  Inaction on the structural revenue shortages that Illinois faces is an unacceptable abdication of the governing duties our public officials share.

Of course, these salient points are based on a range of facts and history about Illinois’ taxes and budgets, beyond the scope of this post.  A significant amount of such relevant detail is covered in the forum proceedings notes, as well as the slides and videos on the event webpage (linked to above).

Also, related to this subject, Health & Medicine’s Executive Director, Margie Schaps, had two letters focused on Illinois’ budget published in the last couple of weeks:

• Consider the long-term consequences Regarding the recent layoffs at Lutheran Social Services of Illinois published in Crain’s Chicago Business
• Illinois needs a budget. Governor Rauner, let’s get it done.  A response to Governor Rauner’s State of the State Address in the Chicago Tribune

Wesley Epplin
Director of Health Equity
Health & Medicine Policy Research Group

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Blacks Hit Especially Hard in Illinois Budget Impasse

February is Black History Month – and Illinois’ eighth month without a State budget. As we highlight black people’s contributions to the American narrative, the message sent by Illinois’ budget impasse is hardly celebratory.

All Illinoisans are suffering as the fragile web of supportive services slowly unravels. Communities across the state are feeling the ripple effects of layoffs, reduced services, slow State payments and the tension that comes with sustained uncertainty.

In the midst of our shared suffering, we must acknowledge this sad truth. People of color, especially black people, are enduring the deepest battle scars from this budget stalemate. And if history is our teacher, these will become the scars of future generations. America’s tortured racial history is embedded in the laws and policies that govern all of us, resulting in widening social, health and economic gaps that operating without a state budget only exacerbates.

Earlier this month, Heartland Alliance’s Social IMPACT Research Center issued a report that illustrates how pervasive these disparities are in Illinois. The study reports that despite significant dips over the past several decades, the number of Illinoisans living in poverty today, 14.4%, is almost the same as it was in the late 1960s (14.7%). While under 10% of whites in Illinois are living in poverty and Hispanic and Asian populations each have poverty rates of close to 20%, a whopping 30.6% of black people are living in poverty statewide, while making up less than 15% of Illinois’ population. And what is even more disheartening is that 43.2% of black children under the age of 17 are poor. In fact, poverty among black people outpaces that of whites, Latinos, and Asians in all age categories.

The report lays out a number of health and economic disparities by race. But what is at least as important as the data is the case the authors lay out for the “legacy of inequality” that colors public policy in America. The report offers a historical soundbite of the legalized racist policies of the past that benefited whites and created barriers for people of color, policies and practices that ignore the generational impact of those benefits and barriers, and the practice of mid-twentieth century redlining that seems to have intertwined race, ZIP code and opportunity into perpetuity.

This budget impasse threatens any progress made towards reducing inequalities in Illinois. For example, last year, for the first time in decades, Chicago saw fewer than 1,000 new HIV cases. That does not happen without a network of community organizations and institutions focused on communities hardest hit by the epidemic — black bisexual and gay men, transgender women of color, and black heterosexual women living in communities with high HIV rates. Blacks make up only 15% of the State’s population but account for 50% of new HIV cases. Yet, the governor’s proposed budget includes a devastating 66% cut to the African-American HIV/AIDS Response Act, a dedicated line of HIV funding that supports the black community, the community hardest-hit by HIV. This at a time when an estimated 6,525 Illinoisans do not know their HIV status and nearly 50% of people living with HIV in this State are not receiving any medical care or HIV medications.

One thing is abundantly clear this Black History Month in “the land of Lincoln:” Elections have consequences. We must continue to put pressure on the Governor and our state Legislature to approve a humane budget with a revenue increase even as we prepare ourselves for the next budget battle. As the late poet Maya Angelou often said, “When you know better, you do better.” We can do a lot better, Illinois.

This article was originally posted on RebootIllinois.com.

Kim Hunt
Executive Director, Pride Action Tank
AIDS Foundation of Chicago

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John Kasich's Ohio Health Care Record: Making Lemons Into Lemonade

It's easy to be critical of Obamacare.

But from the time The Affordable Care Act was passed until a new President and Congress have a chance to change things in 2017, America's governors haven't had the luxury of just complaining about it. They have had to govern.

Governor Kasich and his team have made big health care change a reality by collaborating with the key stakeholders in Ohio. On that

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