Quality
Health Care.
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Access
to healthcare for aging parents is a major concern for
families in the 57th District.
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Access
to health care is an issue for many families in the District.
There are so many varieties of insurance coverage that even
the insurance and managed care companies struggle with understanding
who has what coverage. Premiums on these policies continue
to rise and many working citizens simply have no health insurance.
Employers begin to ask whether they should continue to make
health insurance a part of employee compensation. Health care
providers are discouraged by the interference in their efforts
to provide quality care for their patients.
CHILDREN'S HEALTH CARE. This session I will again sponsor a bill entitled: "Cover All Kids Georgia: The Children's Health Insurance Act." The problem: today, more than 300,000 of our state's children are uninsured, often without any access to healthcare other than the emergency room. The solution: by expanding Georgia's nationally recognized PeachCare For Kids program, with higher income families paying a reasonable premium, we can cover essentially all our kids, continue private-sector delivery of services, and maximize the federal dollars that come back to Georgia from D.C. Our hard-working families, our small businesses, and our entrepreneurs competing in the global marketplace will all benefit.
Last year's version of this legislation is available at
http://www.legis.state.ga.us/legis/2005_06/house/bios/Gardner,%20Pat/Gardner,%20Pat.htm
Click on Legislation and then go to HB 1464.
MEDICAID. I will continue to work with the private sector Care Management Organizations and the Department of Community Health on the startup difficulties with managed care in Medicaid and will take an active role in requesting information about whether they have maintained access to services for the current Medicaid and PeachCare programs and how efficiently they have managed the dollars awarded to them last year.
TRANSPARENCY IN CONSUMER DRIVEN HEALTHCARE.
More transparent information on the cost of prescribed medication is an overlooked aspect of patient care. Believing that consumers would be more likely to be compliant with drug regimens is they knew how much they actually cost, I will introduce a bill requiring pharmacies to print the average daily cost on the receipt they provide consumers in addition to the patient co-payment amount. In other words, a general indication of what the consumer's health insurance had to pay for the drug will be printed along with what the consumer actually had to pay.
Several years ago I was asked to chair a Task Force on Health Insurance
Options for Small Business and Uninsured Workers. Experts
in the industry, small business owners and consumers met in
a structured environment to raise the level of understanding
of the issue and investigate state level solutions. See
the Report of the Task Force.
Children's
health and safety will be a focus of the next session.
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