Florida Hispanic Healthcare Articles

The 49ers are not just the team that lost the most recent Super Bowl. That term and another — the 29ers — are fast becoming part of the jargon of economic analysts and business leaders as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act inches toward implementation.

Florida’s business community, a bastion of conservatism on most matters, was among those pushing hardest for a state measure that would have adopted a major part of President Barack Obama’s federal health-care law.

WASHINGTON – Facing the next big health-care challenge in Florida, Uncle Sam plans to enlist hundreds of consumer "navigators" over the next several months to help enroll up to 3.5 million uninsured state residents by January, when everyone is required to have health insurance.

In science and statistical analysis it is called "Testing the Null Hypothesis." As described in the 1930s by a statistician named Ronald Fischer, during an experiment, when looking at observed data after an event or testing the use of some treatment on a patient, the null hypothesis is the theory the change in data is unrelated to the event, or that the treatment used had no positive or negative effect on the subject.

When given the choice of accepting or rejecting the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) (or Obamacare)'s next big action step of expanding Medicaid to cover almost 1.2 million additional Floridian citizens, our state legislature decided to try some experiments instead.

One of the main concerns in Tallahassee, mainly among the Republican legislators, was over having to accept almost $51 Billion dollars from the federal government while offering the Medicaid health plan to families and individuals under 138 percent of the Federal Poverty Line (FPL). In Texas, Gov. Rick Perry called the federal funds "bribery" (Since when do politicians have to be bribed to do the right thing?) Here in Florida, legislators have offered reasons including everything from becoming increasingly "addicted to federal money" to fear that the U.S. government will default on their promise to the states, even though they have never failed in the past to pay their 53 percent match to our 47 percent funding of Medicaid since its inception in 1965.

Breakthroughs, trends and players in the medical field of oncology. One of the most surprising findings emerging from mathematical models is that blasting cancers with as much chemotherapy as a patient can survive might not always be a good idea. "The classic mechanisms for therapy for 50 years have been to trot out your biggest, baddest drugs, give it in your highest dose possible, as quickly as possible. The idea is you really want to whack it," says Dr. Robert Gatenby.

Democrats are so angry over House Republicans' refusal to accept federal funds to expand health coverage that they deliberately caused action on the floor to grind to a halt. The deliberate slowdown, which started  Tuesday afternoon, continued Wednesday, threatening to reduce the number of bills that will get a vote before Friday's end of the legislative session.

TALLAHASSEE – How much health care can a person get for $30 per month? What about $192? Poor Floridians may be about to find out.

When it comes to opening up Medicaid to cover more uninsured Floridians, business groups have put forth either lukewarm endorsements or red-hot opposition.

TALLAHASSEE – A panel of Florida lawmakers today is taking up a privatized alternative to Medicaid expansion that could result in as many as one million low-income Floridians qualifying for the first time for subsidized health-care coverage.

TALLAHASSEE -- Top Senate Republicans, who last week said no to expanding Medicaid, want to instead use the $55 billion offered as part of President Barack Obama’s health care law to funnel poor Floridians into subsidized, private health insurance.