The REACH Healthcare Foundation does more than provide grants for health care initiatives in Allen and the Kansas City area counties it serves, Brenda Sharpe, its president and chief executive officer, told Rotarians Thursday.
REACH also is active in promoting healthy living and currently is encouraging Kansas legislators to accept federal support to provide Medicaid coverage.
Kansas has turned its back on 100 percent payment of Medicaid for adults for a three-year period, provided for in the Affordable Care Act. Reimbursement would drop only a smidgen to 90 percent in the fourth year and beyond.
“We’re trying to educate legislators,” Sharpe said, allowing that their concern about ongoing costs is unfounded.
“It wouldn’t cost Kansas, rather would save money,” she observed.
The poor, the lion’s share of those uninsured and eligible for Medicaid, turn to emergency room treatment when they become ill, rather than visit a private doctor who would charge for services. Hospitals are obligated to treat whoever comes to emergency rooms, which in their case often leads to uncompensated services and higher costs for other patients and their insurance companies.
A second leg of ACA is the Health Insurance Exchange, which merely is an online way to compare plans and purchase insurance, Sharpe said.
“It’s kind of like Expedia,” she said, an online service where travel and lodging costs may be compared and purchased, often at a discount.
When ACA comes full force, insurance exchanges will be a fact of life, and not nearly as ominous as some politicians who rail about ACA, popularly called Obamacare, want constituents to think, she said.
Two companies, Coventry and Blue Cross Blue Shield, are involved, but each has many plans, Sharpe said. After filling out a simple three-page form — unusually brief for the federal government — people seeking coverage through the exchange will have one pop up that best suits their circumstances.
“It will be comparison shopping,” she said, “and a very Republican idea for about 20 years,” with politicians of that ilk turning on it when it became President Obama’s proposal.
Sharpe said ACA was designed to bring health care into the 21st century.
“It is here and REACH’s goal is to help people digest and understand it,” Sharpe said.
REACH Healthcare Foundation and the Healthcare Foundation of Greater Kansas City came about 10 years ago when Health Midwest sold its hospital assets in six Kansas and Missouri counties, including Allen, to Hospital Corporation of America, a transaction that transferred ownership from a nonprofit to a for-profit group.
By law, nonprofit dollars could not be a part of the deal, and had to remain in a charitable format, which resulted in negotiations between Kansas and Missouri attorneys general that led to formation of the two foundations.
REACH began with $110 million. The other foundation received $440 million. Proceeds from investments are to benefit the poor and underserved through programs that help them directly through access to health care and others that encourage healthy living.
Allen County far and away has the smallest population of counties served, and also has a rate of poverty and uninsured residents that makes the emphasis of taking advantage of federal support for Medicaid all the more important, as well as things REACH funds.
“A big part of health reform is to get people to pay more attention to healthy living,” Sharpe said.
A statistical study of Allen County found 12.5 percent of adults, 1,677, were uninsured and about the same number, 12 percent, hadn’t seen a doctor in the previous 12 months.
With obesity becoming more of a problem here and heart disease the biggest killer at 30.5 percent of deaths, healthy living education is an important aspect of health care. Cancer, also exacerbated by obesity, is the second leading cause of death at 20.6 percent.
Further evidence of the importance of healthy living is that 11 percent of Allen Countians 20 and older have been diagnosed with diabetes, with 3.3 percent of deaths blamed on the disease.
Facts and figures point to REACH’s overriding goal of improving access to quality health care for uninsured and medically underserved people.
PRIOR to Sharpe’s presentation, Jordan Strickler, who academically was the top member of his Iola High graduating class and winner of the Rotary watch, spoke briefly about what he intends to do.
He will attend Kansas State and major in chemical engineering, but isn’t certain what career path he may follow.
Strickler said he developed a list of 50 things he’d liked to accomplish, from fun activities such as climbing Pike’s Peak to more serious, such as going on a church mission trip. The Peace Corps had been thought, but he is unsure whether he wants to devote two years.
Sharpe was introduced by Rotarian Jeff Livingston.
REACH extends to local efforts
