QUOTE OF THE DAY
Wire Points: Wasn’t Obamacare supposed to keep patients out of costly emergency rooms?
Almost 50% of emergency room doctors polled said they’ve experienced more patients coming through their doors since January 1st, the day coverage took effect for millions under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – Obamacare. But wasn’t keeping people out of hospital E.R.’s one of the selling points of Obamacare? We’re now finding out that healthcare coverage is not the same as access, especially in downstate Illinois where doctors are already in short supply and psychiatric facilities are currently stretched to the max.
Dr. Tom Pliura is an emergency room doctor in central and southern Illinois, with privileges at BroMenn Medical Center in Normal, Richland Memorial Hospital in Olney, and Union County Hospital in Anna, Illinois – among others. “I’m now seeing more patients than ever in the ER, sometimes holding patients in the hospital for up to two days,” he told me in a telephone interview. “We’re having great difficulty getting patients placed in facilities due to cutbacks in psychiatric counseling”.
Exacerbating the problem of not enough doctors and medical services, Choate Mental Health Center (also in southern Illinois), for the last year has been in danger of losing federal funding due to patient safety violations. Choate Center is working to return to compliance with federal regulations to avoid being decertified by the Ill. Dept. of Public Health, one of the final steps before losing access to Medicaid funds. These problems at Choate surfaced as Gov. Quinn had already been working to close development centers in favor of residents living in non-institutional community settings.
Chicago Tribune: Hundreds of bills awaiting Quinn’s signature
An extension of a 2011 state income tax increase won’t be in the pile of measures that made it to Gov. Pat Quinn’s desk, but among the hundreds of bills that passed both the House and Senate are ones that would change police lineup procedure and provide sexual harassment protections for unpaid interns.
Still others aim to ramp up protections for citizens against crime, give assistance to adults and children with intellectual disabilities and allow for official research on how best to grow industrial hemp for things like fuel, cloth, paper products and maybe even medicinal purposes.
Lawmakers ended the spring session early Saturday morning without plans to return until after the November election. Quinn’s push to make the 2011 temporary income tax permanent dominated the state legislative landscape, but the politics of the March primary and November general election eventually won out with rank-and-file lawmakers. They proved too jittery to risk putting a tax-hike vote on their resumes just before they ask constituents to vote them in for another term.
Crain’s: UIC’s blue-collar pitch for Obama Library
Up against one of the nation’s most elite private universities, the University of Illinois at Chicago is making a working-class pitch for President Barack Obama’s presidential library and museum.
While UIC’s location close to downtown is expected to be an advantage in drawing visitors, university leaders say geography isn’t their biggest selling point in the school’s competition with the better-financed University of Chicago, widely considered the front-runner.
Instead, UIC officials say they offer the president and Michelle Obama a chance to highlight the egalitarian principles of the first African-American president at a state university serving a diverse student body.
The Fiscal Times: A Better Solution for Detroit’s Blight
The decline of Detroit from its once-ascendant heights has been well documented, but until the release this week of a federal task force study, we didn’t know precisely how bad things had gotten. The Detroit Blight Removal Task Force surveyed nearly all 380,000 parcels in the 139 square-mile city, and found signs of blight — fire damage, code violations, abandonment, stripped wiring or simply overgrown vacant lots — in over 84,000 of them, nearly one in four citywide.
Blight presents enormous problems for any city. It drops property values. It attracts crime and disease. It feeds a dangerous environment — I’ll never forget the story of Isaac Dieudonne, the Florida toddler who wandered into a blighted house next door, fell in the algae-ridden swimming pool, and drowned. It creates a vicious cycle in which neighbors prefer to leave rather than live around it, leading to more blight. It can take over entire neighborhoods and make renewal impossible. This incredible Tumblr of Google street views of Detroit houses over time vividly depicts the deterioration.
Points and Figures: Chicago-Big Data City; Barrington-Serving Budding Entrepreneurs
Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel has tried to do a lot of things in his first term. A lot of people disagree with some of the things he is doing, but when you try to change longstanding things in a city like Chicago, you are going to rub people the wrong way.
One program that the Mayor has been highly successful in starting is to make the city entrepreneur friendly. He has done a lot of work here, and part of that is providing resources to entrepreneurs. The city is embarking on a big data project that will be great in years to come.
“This push towards transparency has created a real opportunity for those of us who want to understand cities,” said Charlie Catlett, senior computer scientist at the Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago, who said he believes the city has moved aggressively to make more data available.
BND: High sales taxes, low job opportunities send Illinois to bottom of list for military retirees
James Harper, 60, retired as an Air Force colonel in 2006, choosing to live in O’Fallon.
Harper does not regret his decision to retire in the metro-east, he said.
“We’re doing fine here,” said Harper, who spent his career in military security. “It’s a good place to live.”
Chicago Tribune: Cook County releases 1st snapshot of new Medicaid patients
New data released in May offer the first look at the health, habits and demographics of about 100,000 new enrollees in Cook County’s expanded Medicaid program under the Affordable Care Act.
The picture it paints is bleak.
More than half the new patients covered by Cook County’s Medicaid expansion program haven’t seen a doctor in the past 12 months.
Eighty-five percent of them are unable to obtain needed medications.
Nearly one-fourth have spent time in a hospital in the past six months and an additional 1 in 5 are worried about finding a place to stay in the near future.
They suffer from heart disease, high cholesterol, diabetes, obesity and asthma.
CARTOON OF THE DAY
