Health panel looks to Legislature
11 02 08 - 13:27
By ALLISON RUPP
Star-Tribune staff writer
Monday, February 11, 2008 2:05 AM MST
Health care bills account for about 15 percent of the bills being introduced in the 2008 legislative session.
About 22 bills deal with health care, said Susie Scott-Mullen, executive director of the Wyoming Healthcare Commission.
Some set up physician and dentist recruitment grants and ban smoking in enclosed public places. Others include the mental health and substance abuse appropriations bill and a measure allowing police to pull people over for not wearing seat belts.
As the Legislature meets for the first day of the 2008 budget session today, the Healthcare Commission will also meet in Cheyenne to discuss some of these bills.
The commission helped develop several of them and will support some of the others, Scott-Mullen said.
The commission will look at a bill which would require insurance companies to cover patients' routine medical costs during clinical trials.
Scott-Mullen said a clinical trials bill was introduced last year, but it "blew up."
"We said, 'We can't have what happened last year, happen again,'" Scott-Mullen said. "No one could find a common ground."
In 2007, the commission got together insurance providers, patients and other interested parties to come to some agreements about how clinical trials should be covered by health insurance.
The commission helped put together a bill about medical safety event reporting, Scott-Mullen said.
"It removes some of the evasiveness," Scott-Mullen said. "It's very clear so everyone is speaking the same language."
Besides looking at the next couple of weeks, the commission will be looking toward its future at today's meeting.
The commission will hear a presentation from Menlo Futa, the coordinator for the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, an ongoing statewide telephone survey about a variety of health issues.
Futa will provide data to the commission on health care access, including how many people have health insurance, personal doctors and the ability to pay for health care.
"We can tell how Wyoming rates with other states, and that is where the interesting data is," Futa said. "On the three access measures, we tend to be worse in Wyoming, and we don't seem to be improving."
About 70,000 people, or 18 percent of the state's adult population, do not have insurance, according to the 2006 survey.
The survey also says people do not use preventive care such as pap smears or colorectal screenings because of the lack of access to health care, Futa said.
The commission can use the data to fix some of these health care problems, Futa said.
The commission will spend most of this afternoon consulting with Bill Lindsey, who worked on the Colorado Blue Ribbon Commission for Health Care, Colorado's health care commission.
Lindsey will talk about the successes and obstacles he faced in health care reform in Colorado, Scott-Mullen said.
"He will be a great resource to help us fill in the blanks of what can be done in the next 18 months," Scott-Mullen said. "We need to know what our unfinished business pieces are."
Contact health reporter Allison Rupp at (307) 266-0534 or allison.rupp@trib.com.