IowaWatch (https://www.iowawatch.org/tag/medicaid/)
Seventy-six of Iowa’s 82 critical access hospitals ended the last fiscal year with negative operating margins, an IowaWatch analysis of their most recently reported financial data shows. Iowa’s situation falls in line with a national report that shows 46% of the nation’s rural hospitals are working with a negative operating margin.
Briana Reha-Klenske starts helping migrant farmworkers lacking insurance who need medical care by asking: for how long are you in Iowa? A bilingual health care manager, her patients are migrant farmworkers who are only in Iowa during the summers, which limits her ability to help.
Don’t be surprised if a guy named Jamie Campbell turns out to be one of the key players in the 2018 race for Iowa governor. Campbell’s name will not be on the ballot in November. He will not be crisscrossing the state, appearing at one campaign event after another. Randy Evans
STRAY THOUGHTS
Randy Evans is the executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council. He is a former editorial page editor and assistant managing editor of The Des Moines Register.
The growing number of aging Iowans means more are dealing with Alzheimer’s disease. Some 64,000 in the state suffer from this disease at a time when Iowa is tightening its Medicaid system, which pays for long-term nursing home care for Alzheimer’s patients.
Several times a week, Lou Stepanek drives to the Hiawatha Care Center in Iowa to spend time with someone who hasn’t seemed to recognize him for more than a decade: his wife.
A summer vacation that is riveted in my memory was in August 1962 when my parents, my two brothers and I piled into our Dodge and headed for Washington, D.C. This vacation was all about history.
Watch out Iowa. Our political leaders seem to get many of their ideas from our neighbors in Wisconsin, and the latest idea being considered there is a real doozy.
The Iowa legislature is back in session. We’ll talk with lawmakers from both parties, from around the state, about their priorities for this year’s session, and hear from analysts about what they expect.
One decision that state law says Iowa’s governor has to make has eluded Gov. Terry Branstad: whether or not to reimburse University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics for Medicaid-funded abortions. It would be a tough decision, and he could make it, Branstad said in an IowaWatch interview, but he would not speculate on what he’d decide.
Federal funding cuts cast bleak future for curbing HIV in Iowa.