Attorney General Peter F. Neronha issued the following statement in response to Governor McKee’s health care press conference.
“The Governor’s health care announcement today is a slapdash response to political and public pressure because of the dissolution of Anchor Medical, and unfortunately, I expected nothing more. Last week, he floated the idea of monitoring quarterly financials of physician groups, which is (1) not enough and (2) something the Governor could have, and should have, been doing all along. Today’s press conference offered more of the same, with the Governor hanging his hat on promises of future studies and reviews, demonstrating a deep misunderstanding of the issues at hand. He began by calling Rhode Island’s health care system one of the best in the nation, once again showing how out of touch this Governor is with the reality of the situation. Additionally, an incremental and vaguely defined grant program targeted at paying administrative costs rather than increasing reimbursement to primary care physicians will not be enough to provide the sustained investment needed. Our PCPs are overworked and overburdened by a state health care system that doesn’t support them. Our residents are scrambling to find primary care physicians to care for them through illnesses and fill prescriptions for live-preserving medications. We are in crisis. And some of us have been sounding the alarm for years.
“We will never fix this crisis through talking points and half-baked proposals, like a woefully underfunded loan forgiveness program which would forgive loans for less than two physicians. And we don’t need more posturing and subgroups. We need significant, state-funded investments, including increasing Medicaid reimbursement rates for primary care now to reach parity with our neighboring states. We need to require health insurance companies to significantly reduce or eliminate prior authorization requirements, as my Office has pressured Blue Cross Blue Shield to do and are working with the legislature to mandate. We need improved data collection systems and analysis to consistently understand the problems our health care system faces, and solutions born out of that analysis. So far, we have none of this. Because when you ignore a problem, or pretend that it doesn’t exist, like this Governor has done here and elsewhere, the problem doesn’t go away, but it does get much, much worse.
“In the coming weeks, my Office will be releasing information obtained through several completed health care studies, both that we commissioned and that we conducted in-house, to help us more fully understand the issues at hand. We will also be announcing a partnership initiative that will offer potential solutions for this crisis.
“Our residents don’t want bureaucratic nonsense and Tuesday-morning lip-service; they want and need quality health care. We need a consistent data-driven, multi-pronged, and innovative approach now that will help us achieve long-term structural reform and will immediately help us avoid the worst of this crisis before it’s too late. Because it almost is.”
Original source can be found here.