Democracy for New Mexico

Peacecraft Organizes Fundraiser for Global Health Partnerships

From Peacecraft in Albuquerque:
Please join us this Saturday, June 23rd for a fun and informative fundraiser for Global Health Partnerships at the Albuquerque Peace & Justice Center, 202 Harvard SE from 6-8 PM! Global Health Partnerships is a local non-profit organization working to improve the health and well-being of the poor and marginalized throughout the world. Currently we are helping to build a health clinic, deliver medical supplies and services, and train health workers in Kisesini, Kenya.

Dr. Angelo Tomedi will speak at the fundraiser about the work he and other volunteers are doing there. We'll also have entertainment, food and beverages. Tickets are $5 students, $7 general admission and are available now at Peacecraft, 3215 Central NE and also at the door. Questions? 505-255-5229 

Health Security Act ACTION

From Terry Riley:
Health Security Local Organizing Committee: There is a meeting of the Health Security Local Organizing Committee on Tuesday, June 19, from 4:30 to 6:00 PM at the Immanuel Presbyterian Church on the corner of Carlisle and Silver Streets. That is just behind the Nob Hill Shopping Center.

Legislative Interim Committee on Health and Human Services: The next important state meeting is in Santa Fe in room 322 of the Roundhouse on Monday, June 25th.  The meeting starts at 9 AM and will last almost all day.  Dr. Debora Challet will presenting a summary of the Mathematica report to the Legislative Interim Committee on Health and Human Services.  We need a large turnout to show the support for the Health Security Act.  (The Mathematica study shows the HSNM plan saving New Mexico almost $200 Million. The other plans will cost more, the worst being an additional $570 Million.)  Speak up now or pay through the nose! You have a choice!

Please read this letter (doc) and please become involved. I have created a web site with a lot of information on what is going on regarding the proposed health care changes in the state -- visit www.whatifyouknew-nm.com.

Editor's Note: For more info on this issue, see our previous post.

Calling All Nurses, Healthcare Professionals (and Everybody Else)

Must read post on the California Nurses Association - National Nurses Organizing Committee blog about the attendance of 1,000 of their members at a special debut screening of Michael Moore's Sicko (trailer above) in Los Angeles. The nurses gave the film AN EIGHT MINUTE STANDING OVATION when it ended. Now they're calling for nurses and other healthcare professionals all over the nation to see the movie when it opens in other cities (including Albuqueque) on June 29th, distribute information at the screenings about reforming the system (which they will supply) and come up with other actions to draw attention to issue.

... calling all nurses, doctors, and other healthcare professionals.  We need you to join the “Scrubs for SiCKO” campaign.  Sign up with us, we’ll send you literature to hand out opening night June 29th. Bring a buddy, and help solve this healthcare crisis by advocating for guaranteed healthcare on the single-payer model.

As the Scrubs for Sicko site says:

Michael Moore’s latest film, “Sicko” brings to cinematic life and details in unsparing and vivid imagery the everyday experience of all nurses as they care and advocate for their patients in the confines of a health care industry that long ago abandoned its caring mission in favor of the pursuit of profit at any cost.

Nurses experience first hand the pain and terror of every patient and their families as they are forced to confront a callous and uncaring health care industry when at their most frail and vulnerable, and the inevitable personal tragedies when they can't receive needed care due to escalating costs and the ‘care containment’ damage endemic to the industry’s medicine-by-spreadsheet credo. 

It is nurses, of course, who are there to bear witness to these horrendous moments every day of every shift in every hospital across the U.S., and who are often the last and best hope for these patients and families.

Get Involved With Healthcare Reform in NM
Of course, the timing for such an effort couldn't be more right in New Mexico, where Governor Richardson's health care task force and legislators are currently mulling the results of Mathematica's study of three options for improving healthcare coverage in the state. Only one of them -- which Mathematica has said would actually SAVE the state money -- would offer genuine universal, single-payer coverage. That plan is the Health Security Act.

For more information on actions you can take to urge real reform in New Mexico, check out these websites:

• Health Action New Mexico
• What If You Knew

Health Action New Mexico will be holding town hall meetings around New Mexico this summer to explain Mathematica's findings and build support for changing our healthcare system so that it serves ALL our citizens. New Mexico's Legislative Health and Human Services Committee will also be holding meetings this summer to develop legislation on healthcare based on the Mathematic report. If you care about healthcare, please consider attending.

Be sure to read Health Action New Mexico's lastest newsletter (pdf) for more info on what's going on this summer, including critical meetings scheduled for later this month.

Krugman Says Single-Payer System the Only Way to Go in Health Care Reform

The good news is that we know more about the economics of health care than we did when Clinton tried and failed to remake the system. There's now a large body of evidence on what works and what doesn't work in health care, and it's not hard to see how to make dramatic improvements in US practice.

As we'll see, the evidence clearly shows that the key problem with the US health care system is its fragmentation. A history of failed attempts to introduce universal health insurance has left us with a system in which the government pays directly or indirectly for more than half of the nation's health care, but the actual delivery both of insurance and of care is undertaken by a crazy quilt of private insurers, for-profit hospitals, and other players who add cost without adding value.

A Canadian-style single-payer system, in which the government directly provides insurance, would almost surely be both cheaper and more effective than what we now have. And we could do even better if we learned from "integrated" systems, like the Veterans Administration, that directly provide some health care as well as medical insurance. --Paul Krugman and Robin Wells in the New York Review of Books

Read the entire article. It's comprehensive, detailed and persuasive. With the Governor's task force currently considering the results of Mathematica's study of three alternatives for reforming health care coverage in New Mexico, now's the time for ordinary folks to get more informed on what works and what doesn't. This article is a good start. I think Governor Richardson, his staff  and those involved with any aspect of health care in the state should read it too.

More nuggest from the article:

... the available evidence suggests that if the United States were to replace its current complex mix of health insurance systems with standardized, universal coverage, the savings would be so large that we could cover all those currently uninsured, yet end up spending less overall. That's what happened in Taiwan, which adopted a single-payer system in 1995: the percentage of the population with health insurance soared from 57 percent to 97 percent, yet health care costs actually grew more slowly than one would have predicted from trends before the change in system.

... In summary, then, the obvious way to make the US health care system more efficient is to make it more like the systems of other advanced countries, and more like the most efficient parts of our own system. That means a shift from private insurance to public insurance, and greater government involvement in the provision of health care—if not publicly run hospitals and clinics, at least a much larger government role in creating integrated record-keeping and quality control. Such a system would probably allow individuals to purchase additional medical care, as they can in Britain (although not in Canada). But the core of the system would be government insurance—"Medicare for all," as Ted Kennedy puts it.

... We believe that the compromise plans being proposed by the cautious reformers would run into the same political problems [as Bill Clinton's did], and that it would be politically smarter as well as economically superior to go for broke: to propose a straightforward single-payer system, and try to sell voters on the huge advantages such a system would bring. But this would mean taking on the drug and insurance companies rather than trying to co-opt them, and even progressive policy wonks, let alone Democratic politicians, still seem too timid to do that.

So are we stuck with a less than effective reform climate because of the timidity of Democrats? Oh, no, not again.... Political timidity: our most prevalent and dangerous problem.

New Blog Debuts on Healthcare in NM

Speaking of healthcare in New Mexico, Terry Schleder, MPH, an epidemiologist who's involved with the Community Coalition for Healthcare Access and operates Community Health Consulting Services in Albuquerque, has started a blog on the topic at Healthcare is a Human Right NM. She'll try to demystify health policy and financing issues and provide a public forum for exploring effective solutions to our pressing health coverage problems. In her first post she explains she intends to "slay sacred & corporate cows in the service of healthcare justice for all in New Mexico." Go say hi.

Learn More On Results of NM Health Coverage Study at Health Action NM Community Meeting

From Health Action New Mexico:

HEALTH ACTION NEW MEXICO COMMUNITY MEETING

• WHAT: Progress on Mathematica Study comparison of three models of health coverage
• WHEN: Tuesday, May 29, 2007, 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
• WHERE: Compass Bank NMSU Foyer
  2444 Louisiana SE (just south of Menaul)
  Park in the lot in the back of building
• WHO: Panelists - Judith Espinosa, Chief of Staff for Lt. Governor Diane Denish, Chair of Health Coverage for New Mexicans Committee; Nandini Kuehn, Health Policy Consultant; Charlotte Roybal, Health Care for All Campaign

Editor's Note: If you care about New Mexico's severe problems with health care coverage and how best to solve them, you need to get informed on what Mathematica determined from its recently completed study of three models of coverage. Mathematica's preliminary findings have been released and this community meeting will focus on reporting and explaining them so that ordinary people, as well as those in the health care field, can understand what's at stake.

The Health Coverage for New Mexicans Committee was appointed by Gov. Richardson to come up with recommendations on how best to expand health coverage to all our citizens, and the results of the Mathematic study will figure prominently in that decision. Our 2008 Legislative Session will be dealing with this issue and now is the time to get informed so we can be active in advocating on behalf of the best option. You can start now by contacting Committee members and FAIR BlogGovernor Richardson and urging them to take bold action to provide health care coverage for all. If we want real change, we have to keep the pressure on.

Visit the Health Action New Mexico website for an abundance of information on this issue.

NM Health Coverage Study Preliminary Results: Health Security Act Option Could Cut Costs

Hallelujah. According to an Albuquerque Journal article on yesterday's meeting of the Richardson-appointed Health Coverage for New Mexicans Committee, preliminary results of a Mathematica study comparing three universal coverage options indicate New Mexico could reap savings by implementing universal health care coverage. Perhaps most compelling was Mathematica's finding that the Health Security Act option -- which would replace the current hodge podge of insurers with a single co-op arrangement to achieve universal coverage -- would result in a potential savings of millions of dollars:

Mathematica estimated that $6.11 billion will be spent in New Mexico on health care in 2007, excluding spending on Medicare and a few other programs the company didn't evaluate. Spending under the proposed Health Security Act, which would eliminate most private insurance and give control of health care financing to a commission, would be $5.93 billion.

The Health Security Act option would utlize a combination of public and private funding. The latest version of the New Mexico Health Security Act was introduced in our January Legislative Session, but became bogged down in committee. The text of that bill can be found here. Similar legislation has been proposed in every Legislative Session since 1993.

Matematica also estimated that the two other options studied would result in small increases in costs to the state:

... Mathematica also evaluated expanding existing public programs, such as Medicaid, to include all the uninsured, and a third approach that would have the state select a variety of private health plans from which people could buy insurance using a state-issued voucher. In that approach, lower-income people would receive state help to buy the insurance.

Expanding public programs would cost $6.3 billion, or less than 3 percent more than the existing system, Chollet said. The third approach, called New Mexico Choices, would cost an estimated $6.7 billion.

According to an Albuquerque Journal article from December of last year:

On October 19, [2006] 11 out of 19 members of Gov. Bill Richardson's Health Coverage for New Mexicans Committee, his third task force on health insurance reform, ranked the New Mexico Health Security Plan as their No. 1 choice to be included in a study that will analyze three different health care reform models and how they impact rising health care costs.

Full Report Set for June Release
As noted in a previous post, the next meeting of the Health Coverage for New Mexicans Committee will be held on from 9 AM to 5 PM on June 21 in Room 322 of the State Capitol building in Santa Fe. The complete results of Mathematica study will be released for that meeting.

For more information on this issue, including links to Mathematica study materials, visit Health Action New Mexico and its Health Care for All campaign.

Lujan Grisham Resigns as NM Health Secretary, May Run for Congress in NM-01

Governor Richardson announced yesterday afternoon that Michelle Lujan Grisham (right) will be replaced by Dr. Alfredo Vigil as Secretary of the NM Department of Health, effective June 11th. The press release reporting the change said "Grisham is leaving her position to pursue an opportunity involving elected office." In an AP report on KOB.com, the 47 year old Grisham is quoted as saying she's considering seeking the Democratic Party's nomination to run against Republican incumbent Rep. Heather Wilson in CD1. Albuquerque City Councilor Martin Heinrich has also announced his intention to pursue the Democratic nomination to take on Wilson in 2008 in NM-01.

A Santa Fe New Mexican article reports:

Grisham said she resigned to have more time to explore running for a local, state or national office. "I'm going to need time to raise money,'' she said. The position of state attorney general is one of her dream jobs, she said, but she's considering a variety of options. "I want to continue to do public service,'' she said. "I'm good at it.''

... Grisham's heavy-handed management style, which resulted in the departure of several high-level employees, has been unpopular with some in the department.

A March op-ed in the Albuquerque Journal questions Grisham's decisions to fire highly respected infectious disease specialist, Dr. Gary Simpson, and regional director of public health, Albert Esparsen, as well as her alleged mistreatment of the immunization program's Steve Nickell, who resigned.

According to her bio on the NM Health Department site, "Michelle Lujan Grisham was appointed as the Secretary of the Department of Health by Governor Bill Richardson in September 2004. Prior to her work at Health, Michelle was the director of the Agency on Aging, which became the Aging and Long-Term Services during her 14-year career there. A lawyer, Michelle also managed the Lawyer Referral for the Elderly Program with the state bar." Grisham's grandfather, Eugene David Lujan, served on the NM Supreme Court from 1945 to 1959, and was the first Hispanic appointee to New Mexico's top court.

Here's the text of the press release on Grisham's departure and Gov. Richardson's appointment of Dr. Alfredo Vigil as her replacement:

SANTA FE – Governor Richardson announced today a leadership change at the Department of Health, where Secretary Michelle Lujan Grisham is leaving her position to pursue an opportunity involving elected office. Governor Richardson appointed Dr. Alfredo Vigil, Chief Executive Officer of El Centro Family Health, to replace Grisham when she leaves in June. 

“Secretary Grisham has worked hard to guide strategic legislation and overseeing a vast array of health programs,” Governor Richardson said. “I respect her many talents and tireless work ethic, and I am confident New Mexico will continue to benefit from her devotion to the citizens of this state.” 

Dr. Vigil (below right) will replace Grisham effective June 11. Governor Richardson said Vigil’s experience will be a good fit that will allow him to continue to push the Governor’s health policy agenda forward.

“I am confident that with Dr. Vigil’s extensive clinical and leadership experience coupled with his intimate knowledge of health care delivery in New Mexico , we will reinvigorate our public health policies and services and work on other key initiatives such as access to services, workforce development and improving New Mexico ’s health rankings,” Governor Richardson said.

Grisham in 1991 was appointed to direct the State Agency on Aging, known as the Aging and Long-term Services Department. She is now looking into pursuing a political office that will enable her to continue her advocacy work for individual rights.

"In my 18 years in state government working for three governors, I have had the opportunity to lead agencies that improve access to health care and enhance the quality of life of New Mexicans," Grisham said. "I am proud to have worked with a dedicated team of professionals who devote their lives to serving and protecting New Mexicans.”

Dr. Vigil is currently serving as the chief executive officer of El Centro Family Health – a non-profit primary care organization that operates in northern New Mexico. He is a graduate of the University of New Mexico ’s School of Medicine and performed his family practice residency at UNM as well. Dr. Vigil is a fellow of the National Public Health Leadership Institute, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is a diplomat of the American Board of Family Practice. 

“I’m honored that Governor Richardson has placed such confidence in my abilities to lead the Health Department at a time when the state is poised to increase access to quality health care.” Dr. Vigil said. “I’m eager to start and move forward.”

Dr. Vigil has extensive clinical and management experience and is an active board member with numerous community and public organizations including the New Mexico Academy of Family Physicians and Voices for Children. He is also a clinical associate professor at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine.  Previously Governor Richardson appointed Dr. Vigil to the Medical Board as well as the Health Coverage for New Mexicans Committee.

The mission of the New Mexico Department of Health is to promote health and sound health policy, prevent disease and disability, improve health services systems and assure that essential public health functions and safety net services are available to New Mexicans.

Governor Richardson appointed Grisham as health secretary in August 2004. Since then, the department focused on improving consumer protection in private health-care settings, improving oversight of long-term care facilities, increasing access to student health care by doubling the number of school based health centers, securing an adequate supply of flu vaccine to protect New Mexicans and investing in facilities such as, a new state laboratory and public health offices throughout the state.

Mathematica to Release Preliminary Report on Health Care Reform Models on 5/16

From Health Action New Mexico: At the Health Coverage for New Mexicans Committee on April 26, 2007, Mathematica Policy Research provided their methodology for comparing the cost of three models of health care reform with the current system of health care delivery in NM. They explained how they obtained data for NM and the numbers that they will be using for the study. Surprisingly they separated out people who were insured only part of the year (46 %) and said we had an unusually high rate of partially uninsured. The power point presentation is on our web site at www.healthactionnm.org. Two ways to access documents: 1) Click on Mathematica Study on Health Care Reform under Health Action New Mexico ALERTS and follow links or 2) Click on Health Care for All link.

At the next meeting of Health Coverage for New Mexicans Committee, Mathematica will present the preliminary report and the financial comparisons of the three health care models:

Wednesday, May 16th, 2007
9:00 AM to 5:00 PM
CNM Workforce Training Center
5600 Eagle Rock Avenue NE, Albuquerque
Directions: Take I-25 to Alameda Exit. Go west and follow signs for the Training Center.

Participate Now in National Parity Day

From Wellstone Action: Today, as part of National Parity Day, David Wellstone is meeting with members of Congress to urge them to finally pass legislation that his father championed for over a decade, a bill now known as the Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act. The Wellstone bill is co-sponsored by a majority of members of the House, but unless action is taken in the next two months in committee, the bill will likely not pass this year.

Today, please call the national parity hotline (1-866-PARITY4) and ask to be connected to your member of Congress. The message is simple:

"I am calling to urge you to support the Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act. This is a bipartisan bill that is co-sponsored by a majority of House members. It is common sense legislation that ends discrimination against people suffering from mental illness and addiction. The Wellstone bill is fair, just, and long overdue. Please support this bill and urge your colleagues to finally pass it out of the House this year."

Thanks for your help in getting the Wellstone bill passed. For more information about the bill and other things you can do to help, click here.