Health Care Reform: What’s in it for Seniors?

July 23 marked 4 months since President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which represents landmark health reform legislation. Signed into law on March 23, this legislation calls for sweeping changes in the quality and availability of health care to all Americans—including millions of seniors. The goal of this new law is to give Americans more control over their health care by way of more benefits, greater savings, better care, and the right to expect better accountability throughout the health care system.

For seniors enrolled in the Medicare program, this new law promises—

• No change in eligibility
• Freedom to choose their primary care doctors
• Gradual elimination of the gap (known as the “donut hole”) in prescription drug coverage
• New preventive care services
• Patient-centered care that is well-coordinated with support in communities
• More doctors, physician assistants, and nurses
• Protection from payment errors, waste, fraud, and scams
• Elimination of high administrative fees paid for in part by premiums
• Longer life of the Medicare Trust Fund

Beyond Medicare, this new law offers a host of provisions to address the challenges of the elderly, Medicaid recipients, and those who are uninsured due to pre-existing conditions. Resources to protect against elder abuse and neglect, improve the quality of nursing homes, provide for home- and community-based support for Medicaid recipients, and offer affordable health insurance for the uninsured are some examples. To protect Americans from insurance company abuses, recent regulations have granted consumers in every state the right to appeal decisions made by health plans.

Now that reality has set in, what do seniors think so far about these changes? Recent surveys show mixed reviews. This month, a telephone poll conducted for the National Council on Aging found that seniors are still confused, or are unaware of important aspects of the new law:

• Of the 636 seniors polled, nearly twice as many (42%) thought the new law would cut their basic Medicare benefits compared with those (22%) who thought their basic benefits would not change. As many as 37% said they did not know.
• About 4 in 10 (42%) were aware of the provision to close the Medicare prescription drug coverage gap.
• Only 17% were “satisfied” with the accuracy and reliability of the information they received about the new law; 7% were “very satisfied,” and 38% were “not at all satisfied.”

Also, according to recent USA Today/Gallup polls, seniors continue to be the age group that is most widely opposed to the new law. Fifty-seven percent of seniors polled in April regarded the new law a “bad thing.” And in June, that percentage rose to 60%.

As more provisions of the new law unfold in the coming months, the challenge to market their benefits to seniors lies ahead. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (the federal agency that runs these programs) encourages seniors to visit Medicare.gov and HealthCare.gov, or call 1-800-MEDICARE to report scams, get their questions answered, and receive timely and credible information.

Distracted Driving

With virtually every American owning a cell phone, distracted driving has become a threat on the nation’s roads. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), in 2008, almost 20 percent of all crashes involved some type of distraction, and nearly 6,000 people died in crashes involving a distracted driver.

It is clear that distracted driving is dangerous and potentially deadly. It comes in various forms, such as drivers doing one or any number of the following while driving: using the cell phone, texting, eating, drinking, talking with passengers, as well as using in-vehicle technologies and portable electronic devices.

NHTSA has identified three main types of distracted driving:

• Visual — Drivers taking their eyes off the road
• Manual — Drivers taking their hands off the wheel
• Cognitive — Drivers taking their minds off the task of driving

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety reports that drivers who use a hand-held device are four times as likely to be involved in crashes serious enough to injure themselves. Based on research by Carnegie Mellon, driving while using a cell phone reduces the amount of brain activity associated with driving by 37 percent.

Recent efforts to ban distracted driving have been initiated by public and private organizations as well as concerned citizens. Under the slogan “Put It Down,” the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) is leading the effort to put an end to distracted driving. DOT Secretary Ray LaHood has encouraged citizens to become his Facebook fan and follow him on Twitter.

This past September, DOT held a Distracted Driving Summit in Washington, D.C. to examine the full spectrum of distracted driving across transportation modes: passenger vehicles, large trucks, trains, and transit. More than 250 leading traffic safety experts, safety advocates, and government officials gathered to define the problem and discuss how best to address it. The summit generated broad agreement among public and private sector organizations and policymakers about the need for texting-while-driving laws. Public surveys also confirm widespread community support for texting bans.

By the end of 2009, 19 states and the District of Columbia had enacted legislation banning texting-while-driving for all drivers, and a number of other states had laws covering specific types of drivers, such as novice drivers or school bus drivers. The  organizations that participated in developing  this sample law included Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, AAA, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CTIA – The Wireless Association, Governors Highway Safety Association, ITS America, International Association of Chiefs of Police, National Conference of State Legislatures, National Safety Council, The National Traffic Law Center of the National District Attorneys Association, Safe Kids USA, and DOT.

As part of DOT’s continuing efforts to ban distracted driving and under the slogan “Phone in One Hand, Ticket in the Other,” a distracted driving demonstration that focuses on law enforcement crackdown was recently launched in Hartford, CT and Syracuse, NY. The demo includes TV, radio spots, earned media materials, and web banners. The Media Network, Inc. produced the radio spots in Spanish and translated and adapted the earned media material from English to Spanish. Focus Driven, the National Safety Council, and several other agencies and organizations also are working on raising awareness of the consequences of driving while distracted.

On Friday April 30, 2010, Oprah Winfrey and Harpo Studios took a stand against distracted driving by launching a new public service announcement campaign and joining forces with some of the country’s preeminent transportation safety organizations to declare Friday, April 30 the first national “No Phone Zone Day.”

DOT, NHTSA, Governors Highway Safety Association, National Organizations for Youth Safety, FocusDriven, Students Against Destructive Decisions and RADD, the Entertainment Industry’s Voice for Road Safety, have joined Oprah Winfrey in the national day of awareness to end distracted driving.

The nation is well on its way to putting an end to distracted driving.

www.themedianetwork.com

New Media Tools Expand Clearinghouse Services

Lots of interesting things are going on in TMN’s clearinghouse business area right now! We just launched a mobile search feature for our clients in HHS’s Office of Public Health and Science. This feature allows people using cell phones and other hand-held devices to locate the nearest family planning clinic by texting a ZIP code to 368674. It’s the mobile version of the searchable clinic database that we also maintain for this client (found at http://www.opaclearinghouse.org/db_search.asp). For the launch, we also created some nifty little promotional materials!

Less than a year ago, we modified the web-based search site mentioned above to allow grantees, who are responsible for updating the information, to do so via the internet. This modification significantly streamlined what was a complex and taxing process. Now, any changes made to the data become live in the database when the changes are approved. As a result, the data in the family planning database can be kept much more up-to-date than was previously possible. Another exciting development is that our data will also be made available through clinic locator services at other websites, such as www.AIDS.gov, in the near future.

For a contract with the newly established Office of Adolescent Health, we created a simple online ordering capability. As soon as it became available, our orders doubled! It’s amazing how much the internet can simplify things for people. Last week, at the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association conference, we learned that an astonishing number of people in the U.S. now have access to online services and information—mainly due to the availability of the internet on cell phones. And on the list of what people use the internet for, searching for health information is number seven, not far behind social networking and getting directions!

TMN Sponsors Government 2.0 Camp

TMN is proud to announce its sponsorship of Government 2.0 – an “unconference” of social media leaders in government at the Federal, State, and local levels.  The sold out event will be held the weekend of March 27th in the Washington, DC area.  For more information about the event, see here.  We look forward to seeing many of our current, as well as future, clients there!