June | 2012 | project millennial

photo credit: huffpost.com

If you haven’t heard Thursday’s big news from the Supreme Court, please tap your life’s Settings button and ensure that Airplane Mode is disabled before reading on. (Come to think of it, if you haven’t heard the news, you probably won’t get that joke.) Okay, the Kanye West/Kim Kardashian saga has been interesting, but SCOTUS’ affirmation of the Affordable Care Act was arguably the biggest news story of the year (Kanye, I’ma let you finish, but the Supreme Court…). In a surprising 5-4 decision the high court ruled that the law’s individual mandate, or the requirement to buy health insurance, is indeed constitutional, and thus the majority of Obamacare as well. SCOTUS did, however, rule that the federal government couldn’t coerce states into expanding eligibility for Medicaid. I appreciate the possibility that all that sounds like nonsense, so in this post, I’d like to decode what Thursday’s news means for our generation.
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Tagged affordable care act, healthcare reform, individual mandate, millennials, SCOTUS, under-26 coverage

Jun 29 2012

As seen on TV: Project Millennial!

by Adrianna McIntyre

This week has been crazy. Ridiculous. Positively staggering. First the media couldn’t decide what to predict about the SCOTUS ruling. Then they couldn’t decide what SCOTUS actually ruled. (Spoiler alert! The mandate was upheld!) And in the middle of all this, some media outlets were actually paying attention to what Millennials thought!

Wednesday afternoon, we were contacted about speaking with someone on news radio in NYC; more details on that here. Early Wednesday evening, an ABC affiliate in Virginia Beach, VA reached out about the same. That aired Thursday night, and the clip is below. The attention has been exciting and overwhelming and my head is still a hot mess whenever I try to process it–but the upshot is that we’re thrilled people seem to care about our message. Many thanks to Jennifer Sendrow and David Ham for taking the time to speak with us.

Now that we’ve shared these, we’ll be shifting back to more substantive coverage… with the possible exception of one more installment in the tweetsaga (for closure, of course). We didn’t prepare any reactionary posts in advance of the ruling; that’s not really our style. But multiple pieces are in the works for your reading pleasure, so stay tuned!

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Adrianna works in clinical research and will begin graduate studies at the University of Michigan this fall.
Follow her on Twitter @onceuponA.

Jun 27 2012

Project Millennial Hits NYC Radio Waves!

by Adrianna McIntyre

I had the incredible opportunity today to speak with Jennifer Sendrow of 101.9 WEMP FM in New York City, to talk Millennials and SCOTUS. Here are the brief, one-minute ministories, from the perspective of multiple 20-somethings. These will be airing in newscasts beginning tonight and into tomorrow until the ruling is handed down.

“It’s politics; it’s not a dialogue.”

The MP3s will open in a new tab/window.

SCOTUS, Healthcare, & Millennials (1) | SCOTUS, Healthcare, & Millennials (2)

SCOTUS, Healthcare, & Millennials (3) | SCOTUS, Healthcare, & Millennials (4)

Feel free to join me in crossing various appendages that my pessimism is proven wrong come morning. (ETA: HUZZAH! I thank your various appendages.)

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12:25am, updated for additional commentary/rumination: If these clips demonstrate anything, it’s that we can’t neatly package the reform debate into twenty-second soundbites. Inconveniently for politics, the health care system is just too nuanced to be succinctly expressed through a bulleted list of talking points: it’s complex socially, it’s complex economically—and that’s before you bring medicine and all of its ethical and scientific baggage into the mix. Don’t get me wrong, I love it for all of those reasons, but it hardly makes for a happy marriage with social media.

In the Twitter-driven news cycle, we are increasingly tempted to distill every issue into 140 characters (fewer for RTs!). As much as I’ve come to embrace the site in the past few months, I think this trend does a disservice to the complexity and importance of the health care debate. I value social media and its utility for connecting with stellar people (hi, people!) and reaching new audiences, but the backbone of Project Millennial will always be the content of this blog, with its thoughtful and occasionally long-winded ways. We love you, Twitter, but you’ll never be enough.

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Adrianna works in clinical research and will begin graduate studies at the University of Michigan this fall.
Follow her on Twitter @onceuponA.

Jun 27 2012

We tweet onward: SCOTUS 2012, Part Deux

by Adrianna McIntyre

Wherein Twitter is a totally valid 21st-century coping mechanism for health wonks everywhere. This is the second installment of the SCOTUS 2012 tweetsaga; the first is here.

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Jun 25 2012

4 Comments

#ross, bioethics, EHR, HIT

Progress at the Cost of Privacy?

by Ross White

As we all anxiously await the Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act, it is worth remembering that for many reforms, “the train has already left the station.” Many payment and delivery changes are going to continue regardless of the Supreme Court ruling. One such reform is the continued implementation of health information technology, particularly electronic health records (EHRs). While these technologies promise to increase the transmission, sharing, and use of health data across the health care system—thereby improving quality and reducing unnecessary costs—they do not come without raising serious ethical questions about the use of that data and how patient privacy can best be assured.

The incentives to implement electronic health record systems have never been greater. The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act), which is a portion of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2008 (ARRA), designated incentive payments of up to $44,000 from Medicare and $65,000 from Medicaid per individual physician who demonstrate “meaningful use” of an EHR system. In order to meet CMS-defined criteria, providers must demonstrate improvement in the collection and sharing of health information to improve quality, efficiency, and patient safety. A Health Affairs study from last year suggests that it would cost a five-physician primary care practice approximately $32,400 per physician and $85,500 in maintenance expenses during the first year to meet these criteria, which is largely consistent with incentive payments. Providers who do not demonstrate meaningful use of EHRs by 2015 will be penalized with a 1 percent annual reduction in Medicare reimbursements. The Affordable Care Act continues us down this path. While many physicians are embracing this opportunity, others continue to resist—or have already experienced adverse effects after having done so.

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project millennial

a generation challenging the current face of health care | redefining what it means to be against the status quo

Monthly Archives: June 2012

What Does the Supreme Court Decision Mean to [Generation] Me?

As seen on TV: Project Millennial!

Project Millennial Hits NYC Radio Waves!

We tweet onward: SCOTUS 2012, Part Deux

Progress at the Cost of Privacy?

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