States’ Attorneys General Get Busy With Health Reform
Filed under: Proposed Legislation, State Initiatives, The Uninsured
Across our nation, states’ attorneys general are stepping up in the fight for health reform. Not too long ago, Modern Healthcare (subscription required) ran a piece called “When Attorneys General Attack,” featuring health reform-oriented attorneys general. Among them was Michigan’s Mike Cox (who is aggressively working to preserve state oversight of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Michigan), Minnesota’s Lori Swanson (who filed a suit against a major hospital and clinic network alleging illegal interest rates), and Texas’ Greg Abbott (who alleged, and forced a settlement, that Memorial Herman orchestrated an agreement among health insurance providers not to do business with facilities owned by Memorial’s competitors).
IL. Capital Rotunda by circle k via Flickr
But special mention should be made of New York’s Andrew Cuomo, Illinois’ Lisa Madigan, and California’s Jerry Brown. Cuomo recently shut down price-benchmarking databases that were setting surprisingly low reimbursement rates for out-of-network coverage. He was then successful in getting UnitedHealth Group, which was subscribing to these databases, to pay $50 million to fund a not-for-profit organization to replace the databases. And you could say Cuomo’s success had an effect from “sea to shining sea.” On Thursday, Insurance Networking News reported a lawsuit filed against Ingenix database– one of the very databases that Cuomo targeted in New York– in a California federal court.
Cuomo’s interest in health reform doesn’t stop there. As reported in my last post (States Respond to College and University Health Care Practices), Cuomo heads one of the nation’s leading state efforts investigating college and university health care practices. The head of Cuomo’s Health Bureau, Timothy Clune, recently spoke to a seniors home in Middletown, New York and highlighted Cuomo’s commitment to helping New Yorkers with their medical and health insurance problems. The Times Herald-Record reports Clune as stating that the Attorney General’s office “handle[s] health-care issues from the $60 denial to ensuring that people get the life-saving care they’re entitled to.”
Lack of Consistent Medicaid Coverage May Cost More
The NY Times reports that a five-year retrospective study of almost 5 million California residents has found that “People who have spotty Medicaid coverage are more than three times likelier than those who maintain continuous coverage to be hospitalized for an illness that could have been managed outside the hospital with doctors’ visits and medication, a five-year retrospective study of almost 5 million California residents has found. Read more here.
Posts from Health Reform Watch have been cited by media sources throughout the country, including The New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times, Kaiser Health News, The Health Care Blog, NPR's Planet Money Blog, Duke Univ. Med. Center News, American Health Line Alerts, BusinessWeek.com, Concurring Opinions, Balkinization, The New England Journal of Medicine, Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism, Las Vegas Sun, Maggie Mahar, Ezra Klein, Tom Geoghegan, and the official homepage of the Office of the Democratic Majority Leader of the House of Representatives, Steny Hoyer.
