Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

McCain vs Obama: Common Ground, Pt.8 – Except for children, more common issues.

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To implement his health insurance proposal, Mr. Obama plans to create a ‘National Health Insurance Exchange’ entity to oversee comprehensive standards. Part of his requirement is to cover all the children. The implementation to provide health insurance to all children is through an expansion of SCHIP. SCHIP is already a government initiative that covers children coming from ‘poor families’. Until recently they have been restricted by continual vetoes from the Bush administration, which acted against the recommendations that the current ‘poor family’ standard was still not answering the pressing need. The recommendation was to raise the standard to include those families earning up to 300% of the government-established Federal Poverty Level (to about $41,000 annual income) because it was found that a large percentage of children still could not be covered. Mr. Obama plans to extend that health insurance/care standard, so all children can be covered.

Referring back to the controlling medical costs portion of Health insurance/care reform, but in a different area; McCain and Obama both endorse the idea of lowering medical administrative costs. McCain proposes better electronic record keeping for both efficiency and accountability, with an eye on reducing errors. Obama is also in favor of these measures and even plans to create a ‘federally-backed’ system. Also in common, is the establishment of more cooperation among care givers. Duplicate diagnostics are one of the most wasteful practices in our system today. Mr. Obama also supports an increased emphasis of what is a new public term called "medical home", recently coming into vogue. The FactBox article provides a good definition of what this is: A primary care doctor who would help coordinate and oversee care.” This is also a highlighted feature with the ‘without health insurance’ segment.

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