Obamacare Or Not, Republicans Should Focus On Reducing The Cost Of Health Care

For all the endless talk about reforming the health care system these past five years, it’s remarkable how little we've done to solve its actual problems. Spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize insurance coverage for several million people? That’s the easy part. The hard part is addressing the fact that American health care is so expensive.

The high price of U.S. health care is the fundamental reason tens of millions of Americans are uninsured. It’s the principal suppressor of middle-class wage growth. It’s a constant threat to businesses’ operating margins, and it’s the primary driver of the federal debt.

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Reform Update: Flood of New Patients Worries Mental Health Workers

Many behavioral healthcare advocates and providers across the country are reporting significantly increased demand for their services because of the Medicaid expansion in some states. But they are worried about whether underfunded and understaffed mental health centers will be able to adequately serve the flood of new clients.

Officials at Arapahoe/Douglas Mental Health Network and AspenPointe in Colorado say they have noticed an uptick in the number of Medicaid patients they're seeing. Those organizations did not have data on exactly how many more patients they're seeing.

Mindsprings Health in Grand Junction, Colo., saw an increase from about 250 people a month to 350 a month since January, and most of that increase was Medicaid patients, Michelle Hoy, the organization's regional director, told Health News Colorado. Similarly, the Mental Health Center of Denver reported that calls increased from 2,030 in January to 2,156 in March, compared with 1,500 in March of last year.

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