McKee announces primary care system improvement strategies. AG Neronha calls the plans "slapdash."
Rhode Island Governor Daniel McKee announced
a series of short- and long-term strategies to strengthen Rhode Island’s
primary care system, which were brutally characterized by Attorney
General Peter Neronha as a “slapdash response to political and
public pressure because of the dissolution of Anchor
Medical, and unfortunately, I expected nothing more.”
“In the changing landscape of health care, we need to take
proactive steps to ensure our residents have continued access to primary care,”
said Governor McKee. “My Health Care System Planning Cabinet will
continue to identify strategies to strengthen the health care workforce, create
stronger fiscal oversight, and support practices in expanding their patient
base.”
You can read the rest of the Governor’s press release at the
footnote.1
“Last week, [the Governor] floated the idea of monitoring
quarterly financials of physician groups, which is (1) not enough and (2)
something the Governor could have, and should have, been doing all along,” said
Attorney General Neronha. “Today’s press conference offered more of the same,
with the Governor hanging his hat on promises of future studies and reviews,
demonstrating a deep misunderstanding of the issues at hand.
“He began by calling Rhode Island’s health care system one
of the best in the nation, once again showing how out of touch this Governor is
with the reality of the situation. Additionally, an incremental and vaguely
defined grant program targeted at paying administrative costs rather than
increasing reimbursement to primary care physicians will not be enough to
provide the sustained investment needed. Our primary care providers are
overworked and overburdened by a state health care system that doesn’t support
them. Our residents are scrambling to find primary care physicians to care for
them through illnesses and fill prescriptions for life-saving medications. We
are in crisis. And some of us have been sounding the alarm for years.
“We will never fix this crisis through talking points and half-baked proposals, like a woefully underfunded loan forgiveness program, which would forgive loans for less than two physicians. And we don’t need more posturing and subgroups.
"We need significant, state-funded investments, including increasing Medicaid reimbursement rates for primary care now to reach parity with our neighboring states. We need to require health insurance companies to significantly reduce or eliminate prior authorization requirements, as my Office has pressured Blue Cross Blue Shield to do and is working with the legislature to mandate. We need improved data collection systems and analysis to consistently understand the problems our health care system faces, and solutions born out of that analysis. So far, we have none of this. When you ignore a problem or pretend it doesn’t exist, like this Governor has done here and elsewhere, the problem doesn’t go away, but it does get much worse.
“In the coming weeks, my Office will release information
obtained through several completed health care studies, both those we
commissioned and those we conducted in-house, to help us more fully understand
the issues at hand. We will also announce a partnership initiative offering
potential solutions for this crisis.
“Our residents don’t want bureaucratic nonsense and
Tuesday-morning lip-service; they want and need quality health care. We need a
consistent data-driven, multi-pronged, and innovative approach now that will
help us achieve long-term structural reform and will immediately help us avoid
the worst of this crisis before it’s too late. Because it almost is.”
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