News stories tagged with "healthcare"

(04/18/12) Pro-choice advocates promoting the women's reproductive health act say they are counting on Governor Andrew Cuomo to help the bill become law this year. In Albany, Karen DeWitt reports. more

(04/13/12) Governor Cuomo has issued an executive order to create a state health care exchange after the legislature failed to do so. The exchange is required by the new federal health care law. In Albany, Karen DeWitt has details. more

(04/11/12) A new poll finds New Yorkers have mixed feelings about President Obama's health care reform act, with a plurality saying they'd like to see the Supreme Court declare parts of the law unconstitutional. more

(03/23/12) As part of the federal health care act backed by President Obama, approved by Congress and before the U.S. Supreme Court next week, states are required to set up health insurance "exchanges." This creates the health care plans that will be available to the uninsured, who will be required to purchase them when the act is fully implemented.

Governor Andrew Cuomo wants to set up New York's exchange as part of the state budget agreement. But Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos says there's too much uncertainty to create now. Karen DeWitt reports from Albany. more

(03/08/12) The Cuomo Administration is cracking down on insurance companies and health care providers who stick patients with unexpected out of network service bills. In Albany, Karen DeWitt reports. more

(02/28/12) After the long recession, most pundits expected the 2012 political campaign to revolve around economic issues.

But politicians on the right and left have instead been reviving some surprising social questions, ranging from contraception to prenatal testing to the role of religion in politics and public life.

In an interview with Newsweek magazine, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat, argued that opposition to insurance coverage for those services amounts to "an attack on women."

"Many of us are outraged, really outraged," Sen. Gillibrand told the magazine. "In the year 2012, we should not be debating access to birth control. No boss should be making a decision about what health care their employees should be eligible to take."

Polls show that the vast majority of American families use contraception and think contraception should be widely available. Surveys also suggest that a smaller majority of Americans think religious groups should provide full insurance benefits to employees.

But Bishop Terry Lavalley, who heads the Diocese of Ogdensburg, sees this very differently.

He argues that Federal changes to healthcare laws proposed by the Obama administration threaten the religious freedom of groups like the Roman Catholic Church.

Bishop LaValley met recently with Brian Mann to talk about the Church's prominent role in this year's political campaign and about the difficulties of teaching Catholic doctrine in an age when even many Roman Catholics are making very different moral choices. more

(01/25/12) Did you make a New Year's resolution to lose weight or get more exercise? Some local small businesses are doing their part to help their employees stay healthy at the workplace. Wellness programs are not new. They've been staples at large companies for years, but are less likely to be used at small businesses. That's changing.

Amid soaring health spending, there is growing interest in workplace disease prevention and wellness programs to improve health and lower costs. Eager to control rising health care costs, small firms in St. Lawrence County are turning to a health experts for help. Todd Moe has more.

(08/04/11) Dozens of swimmers will gather in Hannawa Falls for the annual "Swim a Mile for Hospice" event on Saturday. It's a non-competitive mile long swim to benefit the work hospice does in the St. Lawrence Valley. Last summer, 67 swimmers young and old took to the water at Postwood Park Beach. Todd Moe caught up with members of Team Cobb -- a father-daughter swim team -- just before a recent practice swim in the pool at St. Lawrence University. They swam last year and will be back in the water on Saturday.

(08/02/11) Essex County supervisors are wrestling once again with the future of the Horace Nye Nursing Home.

At a meeting yesterday in Elizabethtown, the supervisors tabled a move to try to privatize the county-run home, which currently has about a hundred residents.

As Brian Mann reports, Horace Nye is seen by many county leaders as a valuable program, one that helps some of the region's neediest and most vulnerable people.

But they say the state property tax cap approved this summer is making it harder and harder to pay for the nursing home's mounting losses. more

(05/05/11) The State Senate held a panel discussion with major health care stakeholders, on how New York will implement the federal health care reforms proposed by President Obama and passed by Congress. In Albany, Karen DeWitt filed this report: more