Republicans managed to secure enough votes in the House of Representatives today to pass a bill that would repeal the Affordable Health Care Act and replace it with a system that uses tax credits, not initial subsidies, to try to get families to obtain health insurance. In Maryland, all but one of the state’s members of Congress were displeased.
Rep. Andy Harris had a long Friday evening filled with boos at a much-anticipated town hall on the Eastern Shore. On Monday morning, he reflected upon the experience on a Baltimore radio show, saying the raucous occasion didn’t go quite as well as one of his online powwows with constituents.
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan traveled down the beltway today to meet with members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet.
Baltimore City Health Commissioner Leana Wen has some serious concerns with Republican lawmakers’ proposed replacement for the Affordable Care Act.
Every year, U.S. News and World Report publishes a ranking of all 50 U.S. states, judging them by metrics within seven weighted categories that indicates which states best serve their citizens. This year, Maryland beat out most other states, earning the no. 8 spot.
On a crisp Saturday afternoon last month, nearly 100 people gathered at the Salvation Army in Middle River for a Christmas party. Children lined up in the gym to take part in a time-honored tradition: Sitting on Santa’s lap in front of a Christmas tree.
But a different scene with pre-Western roots unfolded in an opposite corner. There, an elderly man wearing a feathered headdress sat banging on a drum and singing. A small circle composed of several generations and tribes of American Indians formed around him for a casually ceremonious activity known as social dancing. Side by side, the adults danced and laughed while children scurried between them.
Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake returned to Meet the Press Sunday to defend Obamacare. Her appearance coincided with an announcement by the White House that, two months in, healthcare.gov is now “working smoothly for most users.”
Hurrah. Victory.
It’s pretty hard to play this off as a triumph, and Rawlings-Blake wisely didn’t even try. “We know that the rollout was botched,” she conceded on the program. (Co-panelist Rep. Chris Van Hollen echoed her sentiment in a comment on Maryland’s state run exchange, stating flatly, “Maryland’s a mess. There’s no doubt about it.”)
Courtesy Bmore Media – Payroll manager Joey Campbell used to take her work with her to outpatient chemotherapy treatments at Mercy Medical Center.
But now she has found a more uplifting way to pass the time while she undergoes the brutal, hours-long treatment at the downtown Baltimore hospital. She’s making jewelry and creating rubber stamp projects, thanks to Mercy’s artist-in-residence, Andrea Cooper. Campbell says she hopes she and other volunteers have brightened the moods of patients at Mercy’s Institute for Cancer Care for the past five years.
Did you see the giant New York Times article about how the American health care system is really bad at handling pregnancy? It’s frustrating, to say the least. The average total price for a having baby is $30,000; make that $50,000 if you get a C-section. (Insurance typically pays only a little more than half of that, and 62 percent of women with non-employer insurance don’t have maternity coverage anyway.) Even more frustrating? The same level of care costs way less in nearly every other country. In Ireland, maternity care is free; in South Africa, giving birth costs less than a quarter what it does Stateside. Nonetheless, we have one of the highest rates of infant and maternal mortality among industrialized nations.
Dr. Peter Beilenson has stepped down as Howard County health officer to become CEO of a new health care co-op.
