Gov. Martin O’Malley: The business case for health reform
These comments were excerpted from a speech by Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley to a plenary session of an annual healthcare conference hosted by FamiliesUSA.
Our country is now poised through the Affordable Care Act to help millions of American families and small businesses and their employees access high quality, affordable health care coverage. This isn’t going to happen by itself. This is not simple. If it were simple, someone would have accomplished it years ago. This is complicated, but it is not beyond our grasp [..]
We are ready in Maryland to turn the corner on the healthcare costs that have been sapping our productivity as a people and as a nation. Sapping the productivity of our businesses. Taking from them the ability to reinvest in their own plants and their own opportunities and their own markets. Costs that force moms and dads to choose between health care and paying for groceries, or tuition, or school supplies, heat, rent, mortgage payments. These are the big decisions that happen in the most important place – the kitchen table of every family home.
In Maryland we believe we are gaining a competitive advantage by being an early implementer [of health care reform]. Last year we had the best year of new job creation that we’ve had since the recession hit [..] Why is it that at the same time we’ve cut 7.5 billion from our state budget, we’re increasing the ranks of those who are covered by healthcare so very, very dramatically? It’s because there is an historic truth – not a Democratic truth or a Republican truth – but an American truth and an economic truth. In order to create jobs, a modern economy requires modern investments. Read the rest of this entry »


Is it the role of government to put policy in place to impact the overall health of our citizens? As the Oklahoma legislature’s interim study committee prepares its final report on the state’s obligations under the new federal health care law, the co-chairs have posed a series of questions to committee members to elicit thoughts, opinions, and lessons learned. This post responds to a central theme of those questions, a theme we think has implications for the state’s future prosperity well beyond the new health care reform law.
Julie is an Associate Professor and Assistant Director of the Anne and Henry Zarrow School of Social Work.
Jeffrey Alderman, M.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Oklahoma School of Community Medicine in Tulsa.
The ‘Oklahoma Health Insurance Exchange’ will begin serving as an online marketplace for individual and small group consumers to buy private insurance in 2014. Online insurance exchanges – which we discussed in 


