Health Care (page 6)

The second most contentious health care issue in North Carolina this year behind Medicaid expansion is the proposed changes to the State Health Plan. The State Treasurer Dale Folwell and the Board of Trustees for the Plan set out to change the way that the State Health Plan…

In this month’s Carolina Journal, I wrote about a sensitive subject to many: mental health. I wrote about a trend that I, and many others, find alarming. That is the trend of our youngest generations developing mental health issues such as…

Certificate of Need reform in the North Carolina General Assembly saw some movement last night. House Bill 126, which was rewritten to include CON reform, passed out of the Senate Health Committee and was sent to the Rules Committee. The NC Senate is…

An NPR story from earlier this week highlights the benefits of telemedicine, or telehealth, for those in rural areas of the country: Telehealth turned Jill Hill’s life around. The 63-year-old lives on the edge of rural Grass Valley, an old mining…

The Governor and the Republican leadership in the General Assembly both have their feet dug in on the budget battle. The fiscal year ended at the end of June and North Carolina currently does not have a budget for the new biennium (FY 2019-21).   The Senate…

The House Health Committee is scheduled to consider HB 655, Health Care for Working Families, tomorrow morning. First, kudos to the leadership for bringing this issue forward and to members for participating in the discussion.  The governor is strongly in favor of Medicaid expansion. Many progressive House and Senate members…

Back on June 26th, the Wilmington Star News published a letter to the editor written by myself which was a response to an editorial by the newspaper which called on North Carolina to expand Medicaid. In the allotted space, I explained that despite…

Earlier this week, I posted on the blog about a hospital CFO touting his hospital system’s monopoly power as a way to extract profitable reimbursement from the insurers in the area. This is a dim reality in the U.S. health care system that is dominated by hospital…