BRIEFLY.

The trend toward “consumer-directed” health care is placing more working Americans in high-deductible health plans. While they carry lower premiums, these plans require consumers to manage their own spending to a much greater degree than ever before. This assumes information is available about choosing high-quality and efficient health care services, and that consumers know how to weigh those choices.
Recognizing that consumers will need help in learning to do more health care shopping on their own, veteran health care journalist Jan Greene has created a blog to discuss these issues and collect resources for consumers. Jan is also a new contributor to Oregon Health News, writing about Tricare in the May issue and covering trends in Oregon health insurance and the impact of the tort loss on OHSU’s finances in previous issues.
Jan has been covering health care since 1993, when she became the health and medical reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. After leaving the paper in 1996, she’s been freelancing for a variety of national trade publications such as Hospitals & Health Networks, Annals of Emergency Medicine and Pharmacy Practice News. Her work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times health section and Health magazine.
Check out Jan’s blog, Health Plan Consumer, at www.healthplanconsumer.com, and be sure to post comments!

The Oregon Health Plan’s recent lottery to boost enrollment in its Standard plan was highlighted on the Colbert Report in early May, the latest - and most satirical - in a series of mainstream media stories focusing on the state’s unconventional strategy to expand its list of insured citizens.
The comedy show poked fun at the lottery, viewed in Oregon and elsewhere as a symptom of how dire the lack of insurance is for low-income people. In a segment titled “Pick Sicks,” Stephen Colbert’s conservative alter ego praises the state’s attempt to add 3,000 or so out of the 130,000 who used to have OHP Standard to the rolls – “Gambling for health insurance is a fantastic concept. Health is a gamble anyway.” – and says the same concept could be expanded into other arenas: “Need a prescription? You can have any medication you can grab with the mechanical claw,” he said as a picture of a toy vending machine appeared.
He then scratches off a “Health Mania” lotto ticket, saying he’s “way overdue for a prostate exam.”
View the video here:

The segment can also be viewed at Comedy Central’s Web site.

Let them eat cake, Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden says of American workers in a recent populist video, and keep their health insurance as well.
The Democratic senator’s camp paid for the video, which was approaching 131,000 views as of this writing, hoping that it generates support for the Healthy Americans Act, the proposal for universal health coverage co-sponsored by Wyden. The 90-second clip opens with a line from Reagan: “It’s morning again in America.”
But it then adds that many workers “are chained to jobs they hate by health coverage they can’t afford.” Employees “just generally get s— on,” according to the voiceover. “With Sen. Ron Wyden’s bipartisan Healthy Americans Act [at which point an employee takes his boss’s cake and begins eating it with obnoxious gusto], a new day is dawning – a day when good health coverage for all is guaranteed.”
Under the plan, which is co-sponsored by conservative Republican Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah and has drawn bipartisan support from 12 senators, employees would be able to leave a job and take their health insurance with them. As the video’s workers grow increasingly insubordinate, the voice says the Healthy Americans Act would allow employees to use their right to “take a job and shove it, without losing the health benefits they depend on.”