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The latest on the Key Bridge collapse, New York puts forth legislation to get clean energy projects on the grid and Wisconsin and other states join a federal summer food program to help feed kids across the country.

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Republicans float conspiracy theories on the collapse of Baltimore's Key Bridge, South Carolina's congressional elections will use a map ruled unconstitutional, and the Senate schedules an impeachment trial for Homeland Secretary Mayorkas.

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Historic wildfires could create housing and health issues for rural Texans, a Kentucky program helps prison parolees start a new life, and descendants of Nicodemus, Kansas celebrate the Black settlers who journeyed across the 1870s plains seeking self-governance.

Could Kentucky "Do Health Care Differently?"

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Wednesday, December 3, 2014   

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - As a state that has struggled for decades with high rates of diabetes, lung cancer and obesity, Kentucky leaders say they're looking for innovative ways to reshape how health care is delivered. Enter internal-medicine physician Jason Hwang, who - during a recent Healthy Policy Forum - laid out his ideas for what he calls a "disruptive solution."

Hwang, a Harvard faculty member, is co-author of "The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care," a book on inspiring health-care innovation. As he put it, America must "do care differently" - both at a lower cost and with greater convenience.

"We keep using the same business models to deliver our health care, and when we have a new technology we plug it into these old systems and hope that they can keep delivering care better," he said. "But instead, they keep delivering care in a more expensive way."

Hwang called that "business model malpractice," and said it leads to a "predictable arms race" that raises the cost of health care while delivering only marginal gains.

Hwang and other speakers at the Kentucky forum focused on prevention and better integrating health services. Using the tech industry as an example of how to adapt to change, Hwang said the health-care system needs to decentralize to build a simpler, more affordable delivery system.

"It's not just about changing the venue of care delivery," he said. "It's also changing who delivers that care."

Hwang said his "disruptive solution" targets those he calls "nonconsumers" of health care, a group that includes more than people who are poor or live in rural areas. He told the forum audience that the nation's health-care system forces many people to decide, "Is it worth it?"

"I'm betting," he said, "that all of you who have been sick at one or time or another have had this internal debate: 'Am I sick enough to actually want to engage the health-care system? Because it is so inconvenient, it is so costly, I don't want to go to the doctor.' "

Hwang said using technology such as smartphones to perform basic ultrasound and EKG procedures are examples of ways that care could be more convenient and affordable.


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