RALEIGH — Former Gov. Jim Hunt spearheaded a health policy forum in Raleigh Monday and Tuesday, where policy makers, academics and CEOs gathered to discuss what needs to be done to make healthcare in North Carolina work.
Hosted by the Institute for Emerging Issues, a think tank at North Carolina State University, the forum featured panel discussions on a variety of healthcare issues, as well as keynote addresses by former President Bill Clinton, former U.S. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson.
The need to improve preventative care emerged as a theme over the two-day event. Healthcare spending is currently concentrated in curative care, but for many conditions—such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes—preventative care offers a healthier and cheaper alternative, speakers said. GlaxoSmithKline CEO Chris Viehbacher told attendees that patients’ failure to use the health care system regularly increases the incidence of high-cost, chronic conditions.
Hunt agreed, stressing the importance of improving access to preventative care. “The big picture answer is to get healthier,” he said.
While some consensus emerged about the need to increase preventative care, agreement was elusive when it came to the contentious issue of North Carolina’s uninsured citizens.
The Associated Press reported that protesters gathered outside the conference Monday to express their support for universal health care and denounce the conference as a “corporate-centered debate.”
Many attending the conference echoed the protesters’ pro-universal coverage sentiments. A variety of mechanisms for expanding coverage were discussed, including broadening the State Children’s Health Insurance Program to include parents and creating state health insurance safety nets.
Because Medicaid—a government-run medical assistance program for low-income families and individuals—is a matching program between state and federal governments, various states have experimented with broadening health insurance coverage.
Gov. Phil Bredesen, D-Tenn., spoke to the audience about his experience with TennCare, his state’s controversial healthcare reform plan. Adopted in 1994, TennCare expanded Medicaid coverage to individuals who were uninsured or determined to be “uninsurable” and relies heavily on managed care.
State spending on the ambitious insurance program has nearly bankrupted the state, and Bredesen has come under fire recently for making cuts in eligibility and benefits.
North Carolina’s mental health system has also been reformed in recent years to take advantage of the Medicaid matching arrangement. A few forum attendees criticized using Medicaid programs as a mechanism for federally subsidizing health insurance for people who were not a part of the program’s original target population. But Pam Silberman, vice president for the North Carolina Institute of Medicine, said the cross-subsidy makes sense for North Carolina.
“The federal government should continue to pay its fair share because the states with the highest number of uninsured are often the least able to pay… particularly in the case of southern states,” Silberman said.
William Roper, CEO of University of North Carolina Healthcare and dean of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine, argued that the state should implement a tobacco tax and use the revenues exclusively to fund additional health insurance for children.
Many people, however, said they believe universal coverage is simply an impractical goal for state governments and called for action at the federal level.
“The only way we are going to cover everyone is for Congress to pass universal health insurance,” said Carmen Hooker Odom, secretary of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services.
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