Rep Johnson’s Health Forum Examines The Issues of Medicare And Lyme Disease

By Kaaren Valenta

US Rep Nancy Johnson came to The Homesteads at Newtown last week for what was billed as an open forum on both the Medicare prescription drug legislation, which she helped write, and on Lyme disease.

The Senate and House of Representatives passed bills earlier this summer to create a prescription drug benefit in Medicare. The two bills now are in a joint House-Senate conference committee to reconcile their differences into one legislative package, which will cost an estimated $400 billion over ten years.

A member of the joint committee that is deciding on the final details of the bill, Rep Johnson said health care has fallen far behind other sectors of the economy in the area of implementing information technology.

“Records can’t follow a patient from a hospital to a nursing home,” she said. “Manufacturing has integrated information technology into its systems far more extensively than health care.”

The first “giant step” in the Medicare legislation is the mandate of electronic prescription writing.

“Misreading of doctors’ handwriting on prescriptions is a major cause of prescription errors,” Rep Johnson said. “The second problem is drug interactions. Electronic prescriptions will enable doctors and pharmacies to have more oversight. It will guard against overprescribing and will take advantage of less costly generics.”

One of Medicare’s biggest shortcomings, she said, is that it focuses on treatment when you are sick rather than prevention of illness.

“Medicare should focus on preventative health,” she said. “The biggest chronic diseases –– heart disease, diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cancer and stroke –– are largely preventable. One-third of all seniors have five or more diseases and use 80 percent of the Medicare dollars.

“Treatment should begin much earlier and be much more methodical to stop the progression of these diseases. Just to give you a sense of how far Medicare is slipping behind, we just got coverage for pap smears –– something health plans have offered for years.”

Rep Johnson said the skyrocketing costs of malpractice insurance is creating a crisis in health care.

“It is a scandal what is happening with liability in this country,” she said. “Where is the personal responsibility? Imagine suing McDonald’s [restaurant] for making you fat!”

Such lawsuits are a corruption of the spirit of ethical values in the United States, she said.

“The degree at which adults are giving up responsibility for themselves and passing this concept on to their children is frightening. We need to have malpractice reform in our own state.

“We are on the cutting edge of breaking through to a new level of medicine but if we don’t do something about malpractice insurance, we will lose our best doctors,” she added.

Many members of the public who came to hear Rep Johnson wanted to find out what the federal government can do about Lyme disease. Members of the Newtown Lyme Disease Task Force, the Greater Hartford Lyme Disease Support and Action Group, and others were there to seek Rep Johnson’s help.

Kim Harrison, a member of the local Lyme task force, said there were 584 cases of Lyme disease in Newtown during the past two years but only 22 of these were reported by doctors, the rest were reported by labs. Now, as a result of the end of a grant from the federal Center for Disease Control (CDC), labs will no longer be reporting results.

Jim Smith, a member of the board of the Newtown Health District, said his agency is trying to get a grant to do more in Lyme disease prevention.

Elise Brady, who said she had two miscarriages because of Lyme disease, said there must be a three-prong approach: research, education, and legislation to make insurance companies pay for treatment.

Several members of the audience complained that local pediatricians dropped their children as patients once they began to seek treatment from Lyme specialists. The controversy within the medical and insurance industries about the treatment of Lyme disease has hampered doctors and left patients without proper treatment, they said.

Rep Johnson said there is not a big movement in Washington to tackle the problems of Lyme disease, “but it is gradually dawning on them that there is a problem.”

“I know that Lyme is the biggest illness in Torrington as well as in the Newtown area,” she said. “It’s tragic but true that things have to reach a critical mass before action is taken.”