The Iowa 2008 blog is a companion to AARP Iowa's Voices for the Future. Conversations reported here are the views of attendees and do not necessarily represent the views or policies of AARP. AARP is a nonprofit, nonpartisan membership organization that does not endorse any candidates nor make contributions to political parties or candidates.
Carroll, Iowa
Many interesting ideas and approaches for health care resulted from an evening meeting at DMACC in Carroll.
There were strong opinions about the need for individual responsibility with regard to health coverage from many of the attendees. One gentleman stated that he thought it was the major mistake when employers started paying for health insurance. He thought that people would be more efficient about how they used health care and doctors if they were responsible for their own coverage.
There was also one interesting story that was shared as a result of the “doughnut hole” in Medicare coverage. An attendee’s mother was subject to this temporary break in drug coverage and decided that she was not going to pay the full amount for her prescription drugs; she decided to make changes to her lifestyle and discontinued taking some of the expensive drugs. She began to regularly exercise and cut out excess sugars and fats in her diet. She ended up losing over 15 pounds and is doing well without the drugs. The attendee who shared this story acknowledged that this solution would not work for many people, but that preventative measures like having healthy diet and exercising could cut down on government money spent on health care across the board.
The group was in agreement about too much time and money being spent on paperwork in the health care industry. They thought that going to electronic record keeping would help to cut down the costs and amount of time wasted filling out papers. They thought that innovation and common sense approaches like these could increase efficiency and help cut costs.
