Health Security bill key to improving care in NM
Last week, nine statewide health professions’ organizations sent a letter to legislators and the governor in support of the 2021 Health Security Bill . ...
Our nine organizations represent almost every arm of the state’s health-care system. We treat those with heart disease, and we start IVs. We help people with debilitating pain find relief, as well as those with mental health conditions. We fill prescriptions, do health screenings and deliver babies. In clinics, offices, pharmacies, ERs and hospitals across New Mexico, we are there. And during the COVID-19 pandemic, we have continued to be there for our fellow New Mexicans.
Your political philosophies, as well as personal or family experiences, likely shape your conclusions about how to fix the widespread problems in American health care. Those factors hold true for us, too. But unlike most of you, every week we see up close the harm done from being uninsured, the tough dilemmas from being underinsured, the worry caused by provider shortages and the distress about unaffordable medications.
Too often it seems that we are wasting considerable time, money and morale as we navigate — for our patients — irrational obstacles to care. Those come from insurance company authorizations, differing drug formularies, computer entry requirements, too many middlemen, byzantine coding systems, rejections of legitimate charges, distorted incentives and more.
All this means that we have, collectively, a deep understanding of what is broken and wasteful in today’s health system. Many of us have watched for decades as one hot new reform after another has been tried, with most leading to more complexities, less focus on the patients we serve and mind-boggling costs.
Given this background, the organizations we represent believe the proposed Health Security approach has multiple major advantages over today’s complicated system. Taking this path would ensure near universal health coverage in our state, with most New Mexicans covered by the comprehensive Health Security Plan itself. That would allow providers to focus much more on each patient’s needs and less on their insurance plan. Drawing clinicians to the state would likely get much easier.
We also appreciate that the Health Security Plan eliminates networks for its members but does not disrupt how care is actually delivered today via private and public practitioners and facilities. In addition, three independent analyses have now shown that Health Security would save New Mexicans hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Importantly, the 2020 study explicitly assumes stable provider incomes and fair future increases.
For these reasons and more, we support the passage of the Health Security bill this winter. We are pleading (with our legislators): Please listen to those of us in the trenches and take this critical step now, so that we clinicians can, in just a few years, be less burdened while giving high quality care to all New Mexicans at a lower cost.