Seattle/LocalHealthGuide

By Mark Ganz
Mark Ganz
It is encouraging to have President-Elect Obama declare that we cannot allow these tough economic times to postpone health care reform.
His position mirrors what a recent Regence poll found: People want health care reform now, especially those who must find their own insurance.
Our nation’s mounting job losses are throwing thousands out of [...]

Washington bill would require MRSA screening 
All hospital patients would be screened for the super bug known as MRSA and those at high risk would be tested for the antibiotic-resistant bacterium under proposed legislation, the Seattle Times reports in its Dec. 28th issue.
Patients who tested positive for MRSA, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, would be isolated in private [...]

The universal health-care plan proposed by Washington Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler will likely fail as similar plans have failed in other states, according to an analysis by the Washington Policy Center, a Seattle-based think tank that favors market-based solutions.
The plan proposed by Commissioner Kreidler, called the Guaranteed Health Benefits Plan, seeks to provide everyone in the state [...]

Seattle Times health reporter Kyung M. Song has a front-page article in today’s paper comparing the health-care reform plans of Senators John McCain and Barack Obama.
“McCain’s proposal is arguably more revolutionary,” she writes.
McCain wants to encourage individuals and families to buy their own insurance rather than rely on insurance suppled by employers.
The idea is that [...]

Beginning next month, patients covered by the health insurer Aetna will be able to transfer their medical records to Microsoft’s online medical record service HealthVault.
Currently, Aetna members have access to their personal medical records on a service run by Aetna. Starting in November, Aetna members will be able to transfer those records to the Microsoft [...]

Seattle patients will now be able to shop for health care on a website where they can compare not only the services offered by different health-care providers but also the price and quality of those services.
The new website, called Carol.com, which started in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area earlier this year, is being launched in the [...]

Insurance companies must protect their financial reserves to guarantee they will be able to cover their members’ health costs, writes Regence BlueShield President Jonathan Hensley in an op-ed piece in the Sept. 30 issue of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Hensley was writing in reply to an earlier op-ed piece that questioned why Regence was raising rates on [...]

Premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance are now $12,680 a year, more than double what the coverage cost in 1999, according to a survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research & Educational Trust.
The doubling of health-care premiums outstripped general inflation, which only rose 29 percent over the same period. Workers wages rose [...]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer guest columnists Martha Scoville and Nate Rozeboom tear in Jonathan Hensley, the new president of the Washington health insurance company Regence BlueShield.
Scoville, a Regence policy holder, and Rozeboom, a registered nurse at Harborview Medical Center, want to know why the insurer, which they say has a surplus close to $1 billion, continues to [...]

Neither party offers health-care reform that Americans want, writes op-ed commentator.