March/April 2008
An Important First Step in Health Care Reform
The Legislature also passed the highly regarded “Doctors Across New York” program, giving a much needed financial boost of more than $15 million to encourage recent medical school graduates to set up in shop in health care-starved rural and urban areas of our State.
While these primary care-oriented dollars in the budget are critically needed, the amount allocated is small relative to the weight of the problem. The real positive signal from this budget, however, is the movement toward a health system that better balances resources to support inpatient care, primary care and prevention.
As part of the budget, diabetes self-management training services—services that are ordered by a physician, registered physician’s assistant, registered nurse practitioner, or licensed midwife and provided by a licensed, registered, or certified diabetes/asthma educator—will now be covered under Medicaid.
During the past 10 years, the number of people living with diabetes has more than doubled, meaning that more than 1.5 million New Yorkers now suffer from this chronic, debilitating, but entirely preventable disease. Complications from this disease are devastating with heart disease, stroke, amputations, kidney failure, and blindness among the resulting conditions.
It is essential that the State adequately fund the services that help treat the effects of diabetes, and it is equally important that we move in front of this disease and center our strategies on prevention.
Will the aforementioned shift in training services alone solve the diabetes epidemic? No. But this change does represent an important first step on the long path toward reforms that will help New Yorkers live healthy lives, instead of waiting until they are sick, when it is often too late and always more costly.
