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Friday, January 7th, 2011

Two Dead Since Arizona Medicaid Program Slashed Transplant Coverage

Author:     JANE E. ALLEN
Source:     ABC World News
Publication Date:     6-Jan-11
 Link: Two Dead Since Arizona Medicaid Program Slashed Transplant Coverage
Stephan:   Medicare's Office of the Actuary has just announced that Americans spent $2.5 trillion on health care in 2009, or $8,086 per person -- a 4 per cent increase from 2008. That is orders of magnitude more than any other country in the world spends on its citizens, and they all have universal health care while we have some 50 million people without coverage. And this is what the Illness Profit System has bought us. Republican Governor Jan Brewer is a political grotesque, to be sure, but she represents a point of view shared by a large percentage of Americans, most of whom are also Republicans. This argument is not about money. There is always enough money. We just added $7-800 billion to the deficit to continue giving the rich a tax break. It is about ideology, and it is an ideology that is destroying the country by any one of two dozen measures. That is not a 'left-leaning...liberal... progessive' observation as some will assume. It is based on data. Data. Evidence. Not ideology or partisanship.

Two Arizona Medicaid recipients denied potentially life-saving organ transplants have died, even as Arizona doctors, transplant survivors and some lawmakers push to restore health care benefits slashed last fall.

On Oct. 1, the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System stopped paying for seven types of transplants that the state’s GOP governor, Jan Brewer, and GOP-led legislature said they could no longer afford. The state faces a projected $1 billion program deficit by July 2011.

They eliminated heart transplants for non-ischemic cardiomyopathy, lung transplants, pancreatic transplants, some bone marrow transplants, and liver transplants for patients infected with hepatitis C. Arizona also restricted coverage of prosthetics, eliminated podiatric services, preventive dental services, and wellness and physical exams for adult Medicaid enrollees.

A former University of Arizona Medical Center patient waiting for a new liver died on Dec. 28 — the second person to die since the cuts went into effect, according to Dr. Rainer Gruessner, chairman of surgery at the University of Arizona Medical Center in Tucson.

On Thursday, surgery department spokeswoman Jo Marie Gellerman confirmed that the patient, who died at another facility, ‘was our patient. He was on our list.’ She declined to identify the patient, citing medical confidentiality.

On Nov. 28, Mark Price, a […]

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