Amidst all the talk this week in Washington about reforming our nation’ s health care system, a new report highlighting a great model for reform went largely unnoticed. North Carolina’s Medicaid initiative “Community Care” has made great progress in providing better access to care and saving money to boot!! Yet one of the options the Senate Finance Committee is considering would require North Carolina to move everyone out of this innovative program into a system of profit-seeking private insurance companies that will likely cost more and worsen access to care.

As the Kaiser Commission’s new brief on Medicaid outlines, locally based non-profit community networks of care have worked together to implement a variety of disease and care management initiatives that ensure that everyone has access to a primary care provider with 24/7 on-call assistance. Those with serious health conditions are identified and provided with coordinated care.  In addition, a number of successful disease management efforts are underway.

The results? Diabetes patients had fewer hospitalizations and did better on quality of care measures like primary care visits and blood pressure readings. Asthma patients had fewer emergency room visits and hospital admissions as well. Estimated savings in FY2006 for the state were $150-170 million.

Isn’t this the kind of health care reform we all need???