Medicaid Costs – Colorado

Finding help for high-cost patients key to trimming health care tab, By Michael Booth, June 24, 2011, Denver Post: “Ruby Gallegos knows she is high maintenance. She got used to dropping into emergency rooms for migraines. A nurse holds her hand during blood-pressure checks to help control the doctor-office anxiety that artificially spikes her readings. Gallegos, 42, suspects the origins of all pills. She asks her teenage son to swallow a Tylenol from the bottle before she does. Her panic attacks are getting better on shopping trips, but only in a relative sense: She can now shop alone in a crowded grocery store for 15 minutes while her husband waits in the car, a mark of progress from when he had to be within three aisles. Gallegos’ mental health issues, intertwined with high blood pressure, bowel trouble and obesity, make her a very expensive patient for the state of Colorado. As a high-risk Medicaid user, Gallegos personifies one of the maddeningly irreducible statistics of health care costs: The sickest 1 percent of patients spend nearly 30 percent of a health system’s money…”