Medical Homes

Yesterday I went to a roll out of Nassau County's NuCares program, a long overdue idea to offer medical "homes" to uninsured residents and their children. The poor are often chronically ill--with diseases like asthma, diabetes, hypertension, and coronary problems. All of these are preventable. So the idea is to create primary care facilities, yes another phrase for clinic, but with a different attitude towards service. By signing residents up for insurance through Child Care Plus and Family Care Plus, as well as through Medicaid, the very poorest will be covered as well as the working poor who will be asked to make some contribution for visits and prescriptions.

With preventive medicine the goal, perhaps we can drop the levels of these preventable diseases within our most vulnerable populations. A fascinating article appeared last week in The New Yorker by Atul Gawande, one of my favorite medical writers, in which he explains how cost has nothing to do with quality of care when it comes to Medicaid funding. Read the Annuls of Medicine: The Cost Conundrum.

Art Gianelli and Diane Cohen deserve our thanks. That Newsday, our local paper, hasn't carried the story is just evidence that newspapers aren't doing their job anymore. Look at Newsday.com this morning and instead there is junk.

We get overwhelmed by too much information over which we have little if any control. But when our government leaders come up with something that will eventually improve the quality of life for those who have the least, we should all be informed and applaud.

Clap, clap, clap to Art and Diane.