Category: Public Policy

health care by Cynthia Marcotte Stamer

Caring For The Caregivers: How To Help

Providing meaningful support of caregivers is a growing, challenging and essential urgent need for the millions of Americans acting as caregivers elderly, disabled, injured or ill family members or friends.

Caregiving is surprisingly common. More than 51 million Americans or 31% percent of the adult population age 20 to 75 provide informal care to a family member or friend who is ill or disabled.

These caregivers are the lifelines of the people they care for and the predominant and growing long-term care system in the United States. They are a lifeline for the people they support and our long term care system and they need help. Here’s some resources and ways you can help.

health care by Cynthia Marcotte Stamer

Perspective Change May Offer Best Option For Solving Society’s Asperger’s/Autism Puzzel

The growth in the number of Americans diagnosed with Asperger’s and other Autism spectrum disorders is fueling demands to identify the “cause” and to find a “cure” that to “fix” the these “conditions” while individuals labeled with these conditions and their families struggle to cope.

While certain therapeutic interventions often provide some relief for stress, anxiety and other complications experienced by those diagnosed with Asperger’s or other Autism spectrum syndromes, make it easier for schools, employers, families or others encountering them, or both, the current treatments are not a cure and typically provide only limited relief for some of the symptoms. As a result, individuals with Asperger’s and other Autism spectrum syndromes and the families, friends, employers, schools, businesses and other elements of the community often struggle to cope.
Their experience reflects that the pragmatic solutions for helping those with Asperger’s function better in ordinary society lies in abandoning efforts to cure individuals with Asperger’s by forcing the reprograming of their operating system in favor of all parties working accept these differences and working together to bridge the difference thru mutual understanding, collaboration, compromise and respect. Approached from this perspective, the Asperger’s solution becomes not a cure, but an integration and communication management process with the goal of effectively integrating and managing the interactions between those with Asperger’s to the maximum benefit of all parties.

The resources shared, while not a panacea, provide valuable functional strategies that help people with Asperger’s cope with those around them and those in the community and family to interact more effectively with individuals with Asperger’s. While helping to ease today’s challenges, the insights shared of Asperger Experts who know what it is like to live in society with their condition provides equally valuable understanding that challenges all to embrace the notion that people with and without Asperger’s function somewhat differently, they share many commonalities. The shared goal should be to look beyond the labels and stereotypes by understanding these differences and working together to accommodate each other with mutual respect and understanding.

health care by Cynthia Marcotte Stamer

Calculating & Reporting Your ACA Individual Shared Responsibility Payment

Beginning January 1, 2014, the individual coverage mandate rules of the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act (ACA) generally required most American citizens to maintain health coverage meeting the “minimum essential coverage” mandates of ACA or pay an “individual shared responsibility payment.” With the deadline for filing 2014 individual tax returns rapidly approaching, Americans now generally will be required to show their fulfillment of or exemption from this mandate or pay the “individual shared responsibility” payment that ACA imposes as a penalty for failing to meet its individual coverage mandates when filing their 2014 individual tax returns

Uncategorized by Cynthia Marcotte Stamer

New Opportunity To Share Your Input With HHS About How To Improve Healthcare

Health care providers, health plans and insurers, employers, providers, patients, states, consumer groups, individual Americans and others concerned about health care in the United States should sign up and participate in the new Health Care Payment Learning and Action Network (“Network”) the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is creating to help shape the transformation of the nation’s health care delivery system to promote better care, smarter spending, and healthier people through the expansion of new health care payment models and other reforms. HHS is inviting private payers, employers, providers, patients, states, consumer groups, individual consumers, and other partners within the health care community to register here to participate in the Network activities including kickoff event scheduled for Wednesday, March 25, 2015.