Tagged: health literacy

Every week, KBIA’s Health and Wealth Desk curates the week’s most interesting (or so we think) articles and reports on rural health, wealth and society issues. 

This week’s topics: guns in rural schools and how low health literacy affects rural cancer patients. 

This is the second in a two-part discussion about health literacy and the healthcare reform.  

Not knowing what the online health insurance marketplace looks like might be problematic for Missourians. 

As part of the Affordable Care Act, Missouri’s uninsured can choose to buy insurance from the state’s health exchange come October. The exchange is an online marketplace where anyone who isn’t already insured will be able to compare and purchase private insurance plans. Some uninsured Missourians would be eligible for help with the cost, too.  

Missouri has missed the deadline to create its own marketplace or start a state-federal partnership. So, the federal government is setting it up. The problem is, even though the marketplace is supposed to be open for enrollment in about six months, no one knows what it looks like yet.

“We’re losing time that could be useful in helping people understand and prepare [for the exchange],” said Catina O’Leary, the director of Health Literacy Missouri, a nonprofit group that’s working to make health care topics more understandable for Missourians. “It would be really great if we could manage people’s expectations and start training on what they’re going to need to know.”

But here's what we know so far: 

On this week's Health and Wealth Update, the first part of a discussion about health literacy and the healthcare reform. 

Nearly one million more Americans were without health insurance in 2010, compared with the year before. That’s according to new Census numbers released Tuesday, which also show the Midwest has one of the lowest rates of uninsured in the nation. But even for people who have health insurance, understanding a doctor’s orders can be an obstacle to getting good care.