When the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act became law, it changed the way health care was provided for millions of Americans. The health care reform law made several changes in the health insurance industry, but not all of them were intended.One of the unintended changes in the insurance market involved child-only health care policies. In Georgia and other states, as the Affordable Care Act took hold, insurance companies stopped offering this type of healthcare plan.Child-only Georgia health insurance plans are usually bought by parents who have an employer-provided health plan that does not include dependent coverage, or has dependent coverage they just can’t afford. Sometimes these plans are bought by parents who can’t get health coverage for themselves due to health reasons and still want to provide coverage for their children. And sometimes, these are bought by parents whose income does not qualify for their kids to get coverage under Medicaid or PeachCare.How Did The Affordable Care Act Affect Child-Only Policies?One of the mandates of the act is that no children with pre-existing conditions can be denied health coverage. In response to this mandate, insurance companies in various states, including Georgia, stopped offering new individual plans that only cover children.According to the insurance industry, under this new requirement, parents could postpone getting health care coverage for their children until the kids were sick. The industry said that this would cause a rise in unprofitable health care plans and skyrocketing expenses for the insurance companies to budget.Will Child-Only Georgia Health Insurance Plans Return?An increasing number of states have made a move to address the loss of availability of child-only health care policies, either through legislation or regulation.In Georgia, House Bill 1166 was presented to address this problem. HB 1166 plans to restore these child-only health policies that can be offered by the private Georgia health insurance market.Legislation recently passed the House Insurance Committee that would require Georgia health insurance companies that sell individual health coverage to also offer child-only health care plans during an open enrollment period. The bill would permit insurance companies to impose a surcharge of 50 percent of the premium if a child has been without health coverage for more than 63 days prior to the application for coverage. By doing so, this will motivate parents to keep their children insured and not wait for their child to get sick before getting a Georgia health insurance plan.According to Graham Thompson, executive director of the Georgia Association of Health Plans, the healthcare insurance industry has signed off on the legislation.It was Cindy Zeldin, executive director of Georgians for a Healthy Future, who pushed for the bill. She said that fixing up this unintended consequence of reform is relatively easy. This will help kids get the Georgia health insurance coverage they need since having health coverage is very important. Hospital admission records from 37 different states all showed the dire consequences of not covering children with health insurance. Regardless of the hospital where they were admitted, children without health insurance died 60 percent more often than kids who were covered. The reason for admitting them to the hospital did not alter the outcome, either. Children without health care, like adults, died more often even in the hospital. Zeldin also added, “It’s unfair that some parents are willing to pay for healthcare coverage for their kids, and it’s not available.”The bill just covers one year (2013) since the problem will be taken care of by 2014 when federal health care reform will be totally implemented. By then, the new state-based Georgia health insurance market should be up and running with new Georgia health coverage options.

Charcot’s foot is one of the many problems which might occur in those with diabetes mellitus. The higher blood sugar levels that stem from all forms of diabetes have an affect on numerous body systems including the eyesight, renal system as well as nerves. In long standing cases, particularly if there has been an unsatisfactory control of the blood sugar levels, you can find problems with the nerves supplying the feet. This will make the feet in danger of issues as if something fails, you don’t know it has gone wrong as you can not really feel it due to the harm to the nerves. This might be something as simple as standing on a rusty nail and that getting contaminated and you are not aware that you’ve stood on the nail. Should it be a blister or ingrown toenail which gets infected and you do not know that it is present on the foot unless you have a look. This is why foot care can be so necessary for those with diabetes and why it will be provided a great deal of emphasis. A Charcot foot is the destruction occurring to the bones and joints if you have an injury and you do not know that the injury has happened.

A way of looking at it could be to consider this way: pretend that you sprain your ankle horribly and you also are not aware that you have simply because you do not experience the pain from it. You then carry on and walk around on it. Picture all of the additional harm which you do by walking about on it. The earliest you may possibly discover that there may be something wrong happens when you take a seat and look at the feet and you observe that one is a great deal more swollen compared to the other foot. This is exactly what occurs in individuals with diabetes who develop a Charcot’s foot. There may be some destruction, such as a sprained ankle or maybe a progressive failure of the arch of the foot and as no pain is sensed they carry on and walk around on it. It should be apparent simply how much more injury that gets done to the original injury prior to the problem is finally observed because of the swelling. At times there is not much swelling, but the Charcot’s foot is picked up from the difference in temperature between the two feet as a result of inflammation related process in the damaged foot that generates more warmth.

The development of a Charcot foot really needs to be dealt with as a bit of an urgent situation since the further it advances the much more serious it’s going to be and the more challenging it can be to handle. The individual definitely needs to quit all weightbearing without delay or at least obtain a walking support so that the damage is protected. For the not too major instances and those conditions which were serious and have improved a really supportive orthotic in the footwear is required to support the feet and the injuries. Sometimes surgical procedures are required to straighten the subluxed and dislocated bones. By far the most critical situations can end up with the foot and/or leg required to be amputated as the trauma has been doing an excessive amount of impairment.