Healthy Communities Online

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Andy Slavitt, former Acting Administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under President Obama, and founder of United States of Care, a non-partisan think tank dedicated to expanding health coverage to all Americans. He examines how efforts to derail health coverage for Americans has become political ‘kryptonite’ and how there must be bipartisan solutions to expanding coverage, reducing drug costs and addressing health disparities in this country.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter welcome Dr. Ken Duckworth, Medical Director for NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the nation’s largest grassroots organization addressing mental health issues. They discuss causes behind the growing problem of anxiety, depression, suicide and the opioid use disorder, and viable solutions to address the gap in access to mental health care through better screening, telehealth and better training of primary care clinicians.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with former Pennsylvania Congressman and three-star Navy Admiral Joe Sestak on his late entry into a run for the Democratic Presidential nomination. He shares his expertise on cybersecurity and threats to American health data, the need to move slowly towards any version of Medicare for All, and the promise of the Veterans Health Administration to meet growing gaps in rural health needs.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter welcome a giant in the world of primary care transformation, Dr. Tom Bodenheimer, Co-Director of the Center for Excellence in Primary Care at the University of California San Francisco. They discuss Dr. Bodenheimer’s “Ten Building Blocks for High-Performing Primary Care” which offers essential guidelines for improving primary care practices and patient health outcomes through better use of teams, data, health coaching and reducing administrative burdens in the clinical setting.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, Chair Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California at San Francisco, on a National Academy of Sciences Committee she recently chaired on the social determinants of health. She discusses their ground-breaking report on how to incorporate social care into health care, shifting the American health system towards better management of upstream causes of poor health.