Jim is a 56-year-old man with diabetes who has been my patient for several years; he is a subcontractor in the construction field in a county seat. (I changed his name and those of others whose examples I cite in this blog.) He is divorced with grown children and is devoted to his grandson. He has been uninsured for years due to his medical problems. Starting January 1, he will have health insurance through the Exchange, which allows people to explore subsidies and to compare and sign up for plans. An insurance agent who would not have had any options to offer my patient last year drove to Jim’s home twice from metropolitan Des Moines to set him up with his new policy.
Category Archives: culture of coverage
A Culture of Coverage and Health Reform
(This month’s blog post is the text of an article that I was asked to write for a professional publication.)
As chair of the Iowa Tobacco Use Prevention and Control Commission, I was responsible for helping to guide Iowa’s anti-smoking efforts by following a mission statement created by the Iowa Legislature that read, “to foster a social and legal climate in which tobacco use becomes undesirable and unacceptable.” In this same vein of using legislation to create social change, I will review the actions derived from the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, in Iowa. From this family physician’s reading of the ACA, I submit that the underlying social change goal is to create a “culture of coverage,” which means that, within certain constraints, the citizens of the United States, and residents of Iowa in particular, will have the expectation that they have health coverage and that they will, in part, be responsible for securing that health coverage.
Obviously this 2,000-page law has many more elements, approaches, and objectives, but for me, this “culture of coverage” is the overarching goal. It is with this goal in mind that I discuss what I perceive as the unfolding of the ACA in Iowa.
The Essence of Health Reform: Peace of Mind
In 1993, during the Clintons’ attempts to create health reform, the Iowa Academy of Family Physicians came forward with the Principles of Health Reform (present in archives), which I helped to write. Number one and the most important principle was that individuals should have the peace of mind of knowing they and their families have access to affordable, comprehensive health care.
Failing in that effort in the early 1990s to achieve broad health reform, as Senator Tom Harkin would tell you, Congress and individuals throughout the country sought to make incremental improvements in the system. One of the major efforts was made in the area of children’s health care. During that time, the Healthy and Well Kids in Iowa (HAWK-I) program was conceived, developed, legislated, and passed into law. Working on that effort, I wrote a piece published by The Des Moines Register (present in archives) that described a child arriving at school with a cut held together with rags and electrical tape because of the family’s inability to afford health care. I would submit that that parent did not have peace of mind regarding his or her child’s health.
Welcome to Health Reform in the Heartland
“USA, USA, USA,” cheered the crowd anticipating the upcoming fireworks off Arnolds Park on West Okoboji Lake at twilight on this Fourth of July — thousands of people on land and hundreds in boats on the bay, all celebrating the birth of the land of freedom and opportunity. It is with this sense of freedom (specifically the freedom of speech, which the Des Moines Register reported the same day to be one of our most-cherished freedoms), and it is with this sense of opportunity for the future that I start this blog dedicated to the improvement of health care in Iowa.
During the next 18 months, guest bloggers and I will describe, evaluate, discuss, criticize, highlight, dissect, potentially improve, and — hopefully at some point — complement the effects of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on the residents of this great state. We will dig into topics of health-care costs (our biggest problem), health-care access, Exchanges (now called Marketplaces), Medicaid expansion, Medicare, competition in the private insurance market, health-care labor needs, independent physician associations, preventive health care and early detection, coordination of care (our greatest opportunity), government vs. for-profit vs. not-for-profit health care, rural health care, and, most importantly, the value and ultimate economic wisdom of ensuring that individuals have health care coverage (to me, the essence of living in a land dedicated to freedom and opportunity).
As someone who has, for more than 25 years, been active in health-policy issues here and nationally, I have witnessed and been a part of many efforts to improve health care; I have met Iowans and others outside of Iowa who have shared with me their wisdom and visions of how health care could be made better; and, finally, I have spent untold hours considering — as a family physician, geriatrician, and hospice director who has had more than 100,000 patient-doctor interactions — how these theoretical ideas can affect real patients’ lives.
For better or worse, I share some of this with you in this blog. For the better, I will ask some of these wiser individuals whom I have met to guest blog about their own really fine thoughts and ideas.
This blog will end on December 31, 2014, with a summary of how the Affordable Care Act has fared in Iowa. The next 18 months will be a watershed for health care. Iowa, as always, will be a microcosm for this unfolding of the future of health care. That said, let us get started.