Hello! My name is Luke Wohlford, and I’m a 1st year medical student at the University of Arizona College of Medicine - Phoenix. My goal for this column is to provide useful and informative content on current topics in health policy to my peers. The topics I plan to post on may range from analyzing specific legislation on the docket in Arizona to national trends in emergency medicine.
To start off, I watched an interesting recording of a Google Hangout discussing health policy in emergency medicine with Drs. Cedric Dark and Alison Haddock. If you have the time and are interested in policy, I highly recommend watching it in full below. However, if you prefer a synopsis, I have provided one below!
- AMA is a great way to get involved in health policy, it brings multiple voting groups together in conferences that are open to students. Health policy writing can begin in those meetings.
- ACEP holds a Leadership and Advocacy Conference in DC every year, which can be a great experience to observe health policy discussion and creation.
- Getting a Master of Public Health can be a tool to pursue specific goals in research and health delivery, but not having one will not necessarily close doors.
- EMRA has a Health Policy Committee, which has a newsletter and a forum to discuss current topics.
- When asked what the most important issues in health policy now are, Medicaid expansion, psychiatric boarding, gun control, insurance reimbursement were listed.
- Medicaid is a complicated issue for states that have not expanded it through the ACA.
Dr. Dark mentioned that states that did not expand Medicaid essentially pay for it in states that have adopted it through taxes and lost revenue.
- With the 2018 election resulting in the Democratic Party taking charge of the House of Representatives, the Republican attempts to repeal the ACA repeal is unlikely to continue.