Colorado’s Community Health Centers are joining a national effort to push back against recent moves by Big Pharma that are making it harder to get discounted drugs to people living in extreme poverty.
Donald Moore, executive director of the Pueblo Community Health Center, said a federal program known as 340B has helped more of Pueblo’s Latino community, which has much higher rates of chronic disease and more barriers to accessing primary health care.
“We totally meet the purpose of the legislation,” Moore explained. “Which is maximizing our public funding to reach those most in need, which in our case includes minority populations.”
Over the past two years, drugmakers and third-party prescription drug benefit managers have erected roadblocks to the 340B program, according to a new report calling on Congress to add new protections. Industry has claimed discounted drugs are being diverted to non-eligible patients under 340B, or the savings are not being used to expand access.
Moore noted that the law provides a dispute resolution process to determine if health centers aren’t doing what they’re supposed to. But drug companies and benefit managers are acting unilaterally, adding restrictions and new rules limiting access to discounted drugs at community health centers and their contracted pharmacies.
“They tried to reduce that,” Moore argued. “And keep more money in their pockets, [rather] than allowing those savings to trickle down to safety net providers like community health centers to ensure people have access to the medicines that are important for good patient outcomes.
The report found that 92% of the country’s 1,400 health centers are using the $340 billion savings to increase access for low-income and/or rural patients. Moore pointed to a new clinic, which has added 300 to 400 new patients each month since it opened in January, and six school clinics, all made possible in part by savings below 340B.
“These clinics are an important access point for teens and young adults. But they’re not operating cost-effectively. And we’re using savings from the 340B program to ensure these access points can stay open.”
get more stories like this via email
As summer draws to a close, experts are reminding parents not to neglect health checkups for children. Back to school brings many additions to the family schedule, and parents in Missouri should also consider medical and dental checkups.
Steve Douglas, director of marketing and public relations for ACCESS Family Care of Southwestern Missouri, said a back-to-school eye exam or hearing check often reveals things parents don’t know.
“Maybe you find a chronic health issue that some families weren’t aware of, or maybe you find out something with their vision is a problem,” he said, “just a general overview of things where it is always good to have a checkup with a qualified medical professional.”
Douglas said undiagnosed vision problems in children are among the most common issues seen by health care providers during routine screenings.
Health experts also want parents to pay attention to oral hygiene, have children brush their teeth twice a day and take them for regular dental checkups.
Dr. Donna O’Shea, national chief medical officer for population health at UnitedHealthcare, said some preventable problems are all too common.
“Tooth decay is largely preventable, but unfortunately it ranks as the most common chronic disease in children,” she said. “In fact, by the age of five, almost 50% of children have at least one cavity.”
The return to routines also includes things that have not been done during the pandemic, with many parents skipping preventive care visits for children during this time. O’Shea stressed that hearing tests are especially important for young children.
“Like vision and dental care, early detection of hearing problems is crucial to getting treatment as soon as possible,” she said, “and it’s really important because hearing loss can affect the ability to ‘a child to develop speech, language and social skills’.
State resources and provider information are online at health.mo.gov.
Disclosure: United Healthcare contributes to our health issue reporting fund. If you would like to help support news in the public interest, click here.
get more stories like this via email
Housing displacement and emotional trauma caused by natural disasters over the past year are likely to worsen the mental health of children in the Commonwealth, experts say, and new data from the Annie E Foundation’s Kids Count data book Casey show that the state has already seen a 28% increase in childhood anxiety or depression between 2016 and 2020.
Dr. Terry Brooks, executive director of Kentucky Youth Advocates, pointed out that economic uncertainty and inflation are placing additional burdens on households trying to recover from floods and tornadoes.
“Emerging data confirms what common sense has always told us: growing up is hard,” Brooks said. “You add in growing in the midst of pandemics, in the midst of natural disasters, and that’s a multiplier.”
More than 200,000 children across the state still live in poverty. The report ranks Kentucky 37th among states for overall child well-being.
Louisville psychologist Joseph Bargione said more than half a million Kentucky children who attend public schools have a diagnosed mental health disorder. He said young people need support to develop their resilience skills, as well as time and space to express their feelings and have them validated.
“When we look at primary school students,” Bargione said, “we see problems with attendance or concentration, concentration, academic avoidance, stickiness, aggression.”
He said middle and high school students often suffer from sleep disturbances, eating disorders, restlessness and anxiety.
Gerry Roll, executive director of the Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky, said now is the time to invest smartly in eastern Kentucky, which could lay the foundation for strong communities and build new homes on less-prone land. floods.
“But I think what we’re going to do now,” Roll said, “is think about, ‘How can we rebuild in a way that creates more resilience?'”
Displacement and inaccessibility of housing also limit the resources families have for other necessities such as food, healthcare and transportation, the report says.
Disclosure: The Annie E Casey Foundation contributes to our fund for reporting on children’s issues, criminal justice, early childhood education, education, juvenile justice, welfare reform. If you would like to help support news in the public interest, click here.
get more stories like this via email
COVID has been in and out of the news cycle for over two years now, but this news cycle is driven by big city experience. Coverage of the pandemic in rural America has not kept pace.
This disparity has had consequences — both for how rural Americans view the pandemic and for how prepared regional hospitals are for local virus outbreaks.
As America shut down in 2020 during the first wave of COVID in major cities, rural hospitals in Virginia followed the same protocols and stopped performing routine procedures, even when local COVID cases were weak.
The lack of income from routine care led first to layoffs and then to the resumption of proceedings. Wendy Welch — executive director of the Southwest Virginia Graduate Medical Education Consortium — said after that COVID emerged.
“They started doing the procedures about a month before they got hit with the first wave of COVID,” Welch said, “and then they had to stop doing the procedures again. So that was almost the worst of case – your hospital was full of people, and then all of a sudden your hospital was full of COVID.”
Welch said lags in COVID waves have been consistent throughout the pandemic, and the current outbreak in southwestern Virginia is on the rise.
As thousands of local and regional newspapers have closed, local media coverage has suffered and media further afield are not telling the difference.
Rural residents may see mainstream media covering COVID stories in big cities when not much is happening locally – then, as media attention shifts to other topics, a wave of virus hits rural areas.
Welch said that process ended up confusing.
“We’re going up where other places are going down,” Welch said, “and we’re behind, because we’re more rural. And that’s increased the ability to misinform people about COVID in all of rural areas, because we don’t conform to the main models you see on the news.”
The continued incongruity between media attention and the reality of COVID in rural areas has created space for misinformation to take hold. Welch said as the pandemic continues, those ideas have evolved.
“The misinformation is mostly about the vaccine,” Welch said. “You don’t have a lot of people saying COVID doesn’t exist anymore, I mean for a while there it was called the ‘election virus’ – it would go away after the 2020 election. people are kind of not saying that anymore.”
The state as a whole is still reporting about 2,500 COVID cases per day, but rural areas in southwestern Virginia are reporting the highest numbers per capita.
get more stories like this via email