By: Health Insurance
Submitted: 2009-09-28 14:27:39 | Word Count: 625
One of the problems with health care is that it’s become like a “pie so big you can’t eat it,” on doctor thinks.
The basic and “smallest piece” of the pie is the doctor-patient relationship, but things like insurance and legal requirements have made the pie, and consequently cost, grow too much, physician Robert Good said at a health care panel discussion Sunday.
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“One way to control health care costs is to shrink down that paradigm of the costs mixed in that system,” Good said.
He said doctors in Coles County pay $1 million more a year for malpractice insurance than all the doctors in Indiana because of differences in the two states’ laws. There are also “silly” laws like those that require tests that don’t result in treatment, he said.
The discussion on local and national health care issues took place at Wesley United Methodist Church in Charleston. The church’s Health Care Studies Group sponsored the program.
Michael Murray, president of the Coles Community Health Program, spoke of the program’s developing a clinic for “people slipping through the cracks of the health care system.”
The clinic would provide primary care to people who otherwise have to use emergency rooms for routine care and serve the 17 percent of the county’s population that doesn’t have health insurance, Murray said.
The program is a collaborative effort that’s enlisted the organization that operates clinics in Decatur and Champaign to make it easier to qualify for federal reimbursement programs, he explained. The possibility of federal stimulus money could help the effort obtain a clinic site, possibly in the former Blaw-Knox plant location in Mattoon that houses Life Links mental health, he said.
Meanwhile, the Campaign for Better Health Care advocates health care reform and favors a public option as being considered as part of federal legislation, said Josephine Underwood, downstate coordinator with the campaign.
“We have an amazing window of opportunity.” she said. “It’s the best way to cover the most amount of people.”
She added that doctors in the U.S. congressional district that includes Coles County provide $80 million in uncompensated medical care a year.
“That gets cost-shifted on to those of us who can afford it,” Underwood said. At the same time, Illinois has shown that it can do well with children’s care so “we know public programs work,” she said.
Kristi Massie, who works with Medicare programs with the Coles County Council on Aging, said the concern she hears is reforms won’t change what some see as restrictions on the care people can seek.
“It’s going back to everyone being told where they can do,” she said. “Nobody’s happy with it.”
Julie Dietz and Dave Hunter with the Eastern Illinois University health studies department said what they try to do with their students includes showing various levels of responsibility, on a societal level as well as a personal level.
“How does my health affect everyone around me?” Dietz said. Hunter added that he wants his students to see there has to be “a balance” between what they would like, such as free health care for everyone, and the cost and other things that keep them from being possible.
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