Health Care

Legislation to strengthen violence prevention standards at health care facilities across the state has been withdrawn in the Senate - ending its chances for passage in Annapolis this session. Sen. Katherine Klausmeier, a Baltimore County Democrat and the bill's sponsor, said she submitted a withdrawal letter to the finance committee Monday after stakeholders representing nursing homes and assisted living facilities expressed concerns that it would not leave room for individualized approaches to dealing with violence in varying clinical environments.

We at the Maryland Citizens' Health Initiative are thrilled that the O'Malley Administration continues to make our state the lead dog in the pack implementing the Affordable Care Act. As with the previous two years, we are once again the envy of states across the nation with this year's bill, the Maryland Health Progress Act of 2013 (SB 274/HB 228). This bill will help complete a three year process to ensure that hundreds of thousands of Marylanders that formally had little to no access to quality, affordable health care now have options that have never existed before.

As we struggle through the fifth year of recession, facing budget cuts, austerity and now the sequester, it may be a good time to re-evaluate our national priorities. Last year, the Reach Out and Read program that distributes books to low-income children from 6 months to 5 years lost its federal grant and this year the Head Start program is being cut back. These cuts will be borne by our most vulnerable citizens. These cuts come at a time when there is a growing mountain of evidence that the seeds for our health are sown in the first years of life.

Absent from the critical debate in Maryland over how to rein in health care spending has been a serious examination of the dangerous and expensive policies that some Maryland health insurers have enacted in the name of cost containment, and their potentially deleterious impact on patient health. In the name of controlling costs, some Maryland health insurers have enacted a set of onerous barriers to care that prevent Maryland patients from accessing timely and effective treatment, and place health insurers squarely in the middle of the physician-patient relationship.

The statistic was so attention-grabbing that Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake stopped and repeated it: Nearly half of Baltimore's municipal employees and retirees have a "critical or chronic" illness Rawlings-Blake emphasized the statistic as part of last month's speech at the Walters Art Museum , during which she released a consultants' report about the city's long-term finances. The unhealthy state of Baltimore's workforce contributes to the high cost of municipal health care, the mayor said.

Bernice Troy, a geriatric nursing assistant in Baltimore for the past 20 years, has been spat on and cursed, scratched and punched on the job. A patient once slammed Jo Samrow, a nurse in Southern Maryland, into a wall so violently that she developed a large hematoma on the back of her head. In recent weeks, these nurses and other health care workers have shared their stories before lawmakers in Annapolis with one goal in mind — reducing assaults in Maryland health care facilities.

Federal deficits are too large, and mounting national debt threatens future generations. But as Democrats and Republicans squabble over the mandatory spending cuts known as sequestration that went into effect Friday night, they are failing to face the facts of our budget situation or acknowledge the lessons of history. Since 2007, annual federal spending is up $1 trillion, and deficits jumped from $161 billion to $1.2 trillion over five years. Higher taxes on the wealthy and Obamacare levies will pull down the gap in 2014, but then it will rise again.

The chief financial officer at Anne Arundel Medical Center is watching the fight over federal spending closely. If the federal government goes through with sequestration cuts beginning today, Maryland stands to lose millions of dollars in health-related funding that could leave hospitals such as Anne Arundel Medical Center looking for ways to make up lost revenue without weakening medical care. "We're here for the community and, like all hospitals, we are here 24/7 and will not jeopardize the care of patients," said Bob Reilly, the Annapolis hospital's finance director.

"The first kick I took was when I hit the ground. " -- Bruce Springsteen, "Born in the USA. " So now, Jonah has received a lesson in How Things Are. He is 19 months old. Sitting on his mother's lap on a recent Delta Airlines flight on approach to Atlanta, he was doing what babies tend to do on airplanes, particularly airplanes that are changing altitude. He was crying his little head off. Shut that "n----r baby" up. Those were the alleged words of the alleged man in the next seat just before he allegedly slapped the baby with an open palm, leaving a scratch below his right eye. The alleged man, 60-year-old Joe Rickey Hundley of Hayden, Idaho, denies this sequence of events and pleaded not guilty last week to a charge of simple assault.

Having watched Dr. Ben Carson's speech at the National Prayer Breakfast on YouTube, I can accept his foray into politics because he has worked with people of all religions, and his scholarship fund has supported talented students regardless of race or religion ("Remarks vault Carson into the political arena," Feb. 18). Dr. Carson is a good man. Yet I am flummoxed by his railings against political correctness. Now that he is retiring, he is free to sound off, but I am sure that at Hopkins he practiced political correctness as assiduously as anyone, else he could not have survived there.