Affordable Health Care

“I have three children under the age of 11. No one in my family is currently insured. My youngest child needs vision surgery ($6000.) and we cannot afford it. She also requires maintenance medications for asthma that cost $300 monthly without insurance. I also require maintenance medications and often go without my meds or take less than the prescribed dosage in order to be able to afford her medications. We are a middle class family and among the ‘working poor.’  I worry what will happen if one of my children gets sick or seriously injured. The potential medical bills could destroy us financially.”

    -Laura from Charlotte
    Submitted online via the Richard Moore health insurance petition

North Carolina is facing a health care crisis the likes of which we have never seen before.  According to the North Carolina Institute of Medicine, nearly one in six North Carolinians – over 1.4 million people – lack health insurance. More than 250,000 of them are children. And millions more live in fear that their employer-based care will disappear or become unaffordable as costs spiral out of control.

This is an unsustainable situation that demands immediate action. We already pay more than $1 billion annually to care for the uninsured when they end up in our emergency rooms and public health centers. It is really a tax on all of us that threatens to drag down our economy. 

Richard Moore’s devotion to providing affordable health care spans to some of his earliest days in public service.  The News & Observer praised his work, noting that “In the General Assembly, Moore has made health care a specialty.”  He believes that every citizen should have access to high-quality, affordable health care, no matter what.   It is the right thing to do, it makes economic sense, and he has a plan to help make it happen.

In this section:
Universal Health Care for Kids
Reducing Costly Medical Errors


Universal Health Care for Kids

Children’s health care is just one area in which Washington is failing the people of North Carolina.  Fed up with the bickering in Washington, Richard unveiled a plan to ensure that every single child in North Carolina has health insurance.  Of our uninsured children, roughly 180,000 are already eligible for existing state coverage – they simply have not been enrolled.  One of the hallmarks of Richard’s plan is to reach out to these children to fulfill the promises we have already made.  Specifically, Richard’s plan:

• Offers financial incentives to hospitals, schools, and community health centers to enroll all children eligible for Medicaid and Health Choice.

• Provides full public coverage to children in families up to 250% of federal poverty guidelines, and subsidized coverage on a sliding scale, similar to the current Kids’ Care initiative, for children in families from 250%-300% of federal poverty guidelines.

• Will simplify the complicated existing enrollment process so that it is easier to enroll more children.

• Makes parents responsible for providing their child’s health policy number on their state tax returns in order to enroll more children.

Insuring every child is one of the best investments we can make.  Studies show that children with health insurance have health problems identified earlier in life, are more likely to receive preventative care, and have significantly reduced rates of avoidable hospitalization.  Students with health insurance also perform better in school.  The Asheville Citizen-Times wrote, “Richard Moore is right when he says healthy students learn better and live more productive lives."  Moreover, insuring every child will also help to reduce North Carolina’s racial disparity in health, where African-American children are 34% more likely to be uninsured that white children.


Reducing Costly Medical Errors

Based on the national Institute of Medicine’s data, we can estimate that preventable medical errors cause between 1,259 and 2,803 deaths in North Carolina each year.  These errors cost our residents, families and communities between $486 million and $830 million annually in lost wages, lost productivity and increased health care costs. With much success, North Carolina health care providers and hospitals renewed their focus on quality and safety after the 1999 Institute of Medicine report on error, but there is always room to do more. In partnership with providers and hospitals, Richard will work to improve both the quality of health care and stretch state health care dollars by reducing preventable medical errors.  In August of 2007, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced a new rule that would stop Medicare reimbursements to hospitals for costs associated with preventable medical errors.  As governor, Richard will extend this rule to the health care programs paid for by the State of North Carolina.

According to the new federal rule, for discharges occurring on or after October 1, 2008, hospitals will no longer receive additional Medicare payment for cases in which one of the selected conditions was not present on admission. These conditions are:

• Serious preventable events such as objects left in during surgery, air embolisms, and blood incompatibility

• Catheter Associated Urinary Tract Infections

• Pressure Ulcers (bed sores)

• Vascular Catheter Associated Infection

• Surgical Site Infection – Mediastinitis after Coronary Artery Bypass Graft

• Falls and trauma such as fractures, dislocations, intracranial injuries, crushing injuries, and burns.

The federal government has done extensive work to identify the conditions that are high volume or high cost, and could have reasonably been prevented. They held extended comment periods, thoroughly researched prevention protocols, and ensured each incident on the list has a unique diagnosis code. Adopting the federal rule will help ensure that this new initiative does not create a burdensome new bureaucracy for our health care providers and hospitals. Richard’s administration will work with them to make implementation of the new rule fair and practical.

Extending this rule to health care programs funded by the State of North Carolina will both increase the quality of care provided in North Carolina and save money. Specifically, Richard will extend the new CMS rule to the Medicaid program, State Health Plan, High Risk Pool, NC Health Choice and the Department of Corrections. These programs cover 2.3 million North Carolinians and cost more than $5.3 billion each year.

Applying the new Medicare rule to state-funded programs will further incentivize our hospitals to increase their focus on preventable medical errors. Hospitals will adopt and implement system-wide error reduction systems that will benefit all patients, regardless of whether they are participants in a state-sponsored health care program. Improving quality helps bring costs under control for businesses and families struggling to pay their own health care premiums.