WASHINGTON — Mississippi Insurance Commissioner Mike Chaney was in Washington yesterday to meet with the Obama Administration to discuss the healthcare law. A news release from his office says Chaney will be among several insurance commissioners from other states attending the meeting. Earlier this week, Chaney told the Joint Legislative Budget Committee he was going [...] [...]
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama once told Democratic lawmakers they’d be proud to campaign on historic health care legislation. Six months later, the only Democrats running ads about it are the ones who voted “no.” Now, with crucial midterm elections approaching, the White House is preparing to use the law’s six-month anniversary to reintroduce it [...] [...]
WASHINGTON — Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.) is a cosponsor of HR 4972, the bill to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — the healthcare reform bill. He signed the discharge petition to bring HR 4972 to the floor of the House of Representatives for a vote to repeal the bill that became law [...] [...]
JACKSON — Mississippi Medicaid officials say the federal healthcare overhaul could push as many as 400,000 additional people onto the rolls of the state program. Medicaid director Bob Robinson said in a news release yesterday that the state is struggling to pay for its current program. About one-fifth of Mississippi residents are already covered by [...] [...]
Twenty states — including Mississippi — and the nation’s most influential small business lobby plan today to file their response to the government’s attempt to dismiss their lawsuit challenging President Barack Obama’s healthcare overhaul. The Justice Department in June asked a federal judge to dismiss the lawsuit, saying the U.S. District Court in Pensacola lacks [...] [...]
WASHINGTON — A report on the financial condition of the Medicare and Social Security programs contends the Obama administration’s sweeping healthcare overhaul will extend the life of the Medicare hospital insurance fund by 12 years — an assertion that Medicare’s top numbers-cruncher disputed. The report acknowledged in its own right that the brighter outlook for [...] [...]
JACKSON — Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour says the federal healthcare overhaul will clobber small businesses with expensive mandates. The Republican spoke to hundreds of people yesterday during a meeting sponsored by the Mississippi Economic Council and other business groups. Several weeks ago, Barbour joined a Florida lawsuit that seeks to block the health law that [...] [...]
WASHINGTON — The new health overhaul law will start producing savings for Medicare right away, and over time add 12 years of solvency to the program’s giant trust fund for inpatient care, the Obama administration says in a report to be released today. Medicare will save about $8 billion by the end of next year, [...] [...]
Organizations waiting for specific instructions Healthcare financial experts have raised concerns about how non-profit hospitals will be impacted by healthcare reform that will bring difficult challenges of reduced payments while hospitals are also being tasked to improve efficiency. Moody’s Investors Service warns stand-alone community hospitals could suffer, which might force spending cuts and mergers among [...] [...]

by Amy McCullough Published: August 1,2010
Tags: Emergency Room, FQHCs, Health Department, healthcare reform, Healthy Linkages, Michael Jones, Mississippi Healthy Linkages Project, Mississippi Primary Health Care Association, patient referral, UMMC, University of Mississippi Medical Center
In Sept. 2008, the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson began an innovative program to match Emergency Room patients with preventative care physicians in medical homes. Now the hospital believes it is seeing positive results. UMMC sees more than 100,000 ER patients a year. More than 30,000 of those patients are uninsured, and about [...] [...]