Stories
Families from across the socioeconomic spectrum are living without health care coverage; 87% of Arizona’s uninsured children reside in working families.  The costs of care are increasingly beyond the reach of Arizona families. Tucson also faces a severe health care worker shortage, from nurses to specialist physicians, leading to extended waits in emergency rooms and patient transfers to hospitals in Phoenix.

Research
Healthy Arizona is developing policy steps to provide health care coverage and access to families who currently cannot afford critical health care services.  That organization is gathering information to identify the best methods of presenting an initiative on the 2008 statewide ballot.

The current healthcare challenges include: 

• Insurance companies are raising premiums, further excluding people from coverage;
• Pharmaceutical companies are spending increasing amounts of money on advertising, while not matching those increases in research and development budgets;
• Hospitals are reacting to competition by acquiring the newest, most expensive equipment and launching capital campaigns to increase their market share of the industry;
• Emergency room doctors are prescribing more expensive medical tests and medications in order to defend their treatments in the face of potential litigation.  Emergency rooms – and especially trauma centers – are facing shortages that appear to be dramatically escalating.

In the face of these escalating costs, uncompensated (uninsured) care causes a cost shifting to insurance charges, accounting for 12% of the cost of health insurance premiums.  As these costs are escalating dramatically, the success of Arizona’s AHCCCS in structuring a health care program has shown that public administration of a statewide public program is not only possible but may be desirable.

Possible Action Steps

• Continue to gather stories through house meetings to better understand which are the populations most in need of immediate health care reform
• Decide as an organization whether to work with Healthy Arizona to gather signatures for an expanded health care coverage initiative on the November 20078 ballot and to support that initiative’s passage.

At the local level, Pima county officials have recently proposed a $750 million bond package, likely to appear on the November 2008 ballot, which will expand Kino Hospital. The expansion would include a new Pima Community College campus focused on health-care professions.
Important actions on this level would include:

Meeting with County Administrator Chuck Huckleberry and UPH CEO Norm Botsford to learn more about the details of this massive bond package. Back to top

 

Source: Dr. Duke Duncan, Healthy Arizona