One of the more astonishing proposals of the Governor’s budget cuts was a “10 appointment maximum” for Medi-Cal patients. <\/p>\n
In an effort to close the state budget gap, California health officials are proposing a “hard cap” of 10 medical visits per year for needy patients who rely on the Medi-Cal program for health care.<\/p>\n
Some patients and health advocates are calling the strategy a “death sentence” for patients who need dialysis treatments to clean their blood or chemotherapy to rid them of cancer. The bipartisan(sic) Legislative Analyst’s Office recommended a cap that also grants exemptions<\/a> for certain services or conditions.<\/p>\n
The 10-visit cap (PDF)<\/a>, estimated to save the state $200 million a year, would affect the 10 percent of California patients who rely most heavily on the Medi-Cal program to meet their medical needs. (California Watch<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In many ways, this cap is just as scary as the non-existant “death panels” from the health care debate. This ten-visit cap would mean death for those that are easily treated through consistent, but expensive, care.<\/p>\n
This cut is simplistic, and not really reflective of a more thoughtful approach of tightly managing care for the most expensive patients. As of yet, nobody has acted on the Leg Analyst’s suggestion, but one hopes that is something of a given. A harsh 10-appointment cap is simply unacceptable.<\/p>\n
We are still waiting to see how the legislature acts on Brown’s proposal, but I would be pretty shocked if this particular one got too far. <\/p>\n
At any rate, why aren’t we seeing Tea Party fury on this? Oh, right, this is poor people, so it’s not that big of a deal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the more astonishing proposals of the Governor’s budget cuts was a “10 appointment maximum” for Medi-Cal patients. <\/p>\n
In an effort to close the state budget gap, California health officials are proposing a “hard cap” of 10 medical visits per year for needy patients who rely on the Medi-Cal program for health care.<\/p>\n
Some patients and health advocates are calling the strategy a “death sentence” for patients who need dialysis treatments to clean their blood or chemotherapy to rid them of cancer. The bipartisan(sic) Legislative Analyst’s Office recommended a cap that also grants exemptions<\/a> for certain services or conditions.<\/p>\n
The 10-visit cap (PDF)<\/a>, estimated to save the state $200 million a year, would affect the 10 percent of California patients who rely most heavily on the Medi-Cal program to meet their medical needs. (California Watch<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In many ways, this cap is just as scary as the non-existant “death panels” from the health care debate. This ten-visit cap would mean death for those that are easily treated through consistent, but expensive, care.<\/p>\n
This cut is simplistic, and not really reflective of a more thoughtful approach of tightly managing care for the most expensive patients. As of yet, nobody has acted on the Leg Analyst’s suggestion, but one hopes that is something of a given. A harsh 10-appointment cap is simply unacceptable.<\/p>\n
We are still waiting to see how the legislature acts on Brown’s proposal, but I would be pretty shocked if this particular one got too far. <\/p>\n
At any rate, why aren’t we seeing Tea Party fury on this? Oh, right, this is poor people, so it’s not that big of a deal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[117,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-117","category-22"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pvhz-3pD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13121\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}