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This web site is brought to you courtesy of
many months of dedication and hard work from volunteer members of the
Alabama Black Belt Action
Commission (BBAC) Committee on Health - Medicaid/Uninsured Subcommittee and
the Alabama Department of Public Health
(ADPH).
As an employer, offering health insurance to your
employees means attracting and retaining quality employees, gaining tax
advantages, increasing productivity, and ensuring the wellness of your
workforce.
Governor Bob Riley established the BBAC in 2004 and
appointed U.S. Representative Artur Davis to chair the Health Committee. The
BBAC Health Subcommittee on Medicaid and the Uninsured partnered with the ADPH
to utilize research data and potential solutions identified in a federal Health
Resources Services Administration (HRSA) planning grant project, Insurance
Directions for Every Alabamian (IDEA), awarded to ADPH in 2002. One of the key
issues identified in the original grant was the lack of understanding about
health insurance coverage, tax benefits and savings among employers and
consumers. Through a grant extension, ADPH and the BBAC Medicaid/Uninsured
subcommittee conducted additional focus groups throughout Alabama's Black Belt
region to further identify knowledge and understanding of the issues. One key
result validated that many employees are not taking advantage of employer
health plans, partially because they do not understand the tax advantages. The
focus group data also identified that many employers do not understand tax
advantages currently available to them.
HealthInsurance.Alabama.Gov is
a direct result of the grant research and solution initiative. However, it is
only one step in solving a knowledge deficit not only in the Black Belt region,
our area of focus, but also throughout the state. All of us are committed to
improving the quality of life for the Black Belt and all Alabamians via many
pathways. This is just one pathway. We hope providing general information,
resources, and a calculator that demonstrates the tax liability savings while
illustrating the actual take home pay change when choosing health insurance,
will encourage many more Alabamians to participate in existing employer
coverage.
The web site will be maintained by ADPH's Office of
Primary Care and Rural Health, which will ensure response to any questions
submitted through the Contact us form. It is the
mission of the Office of Primary Care and Rural Health to facilitate and
participate in activities to improve access to health care services for all
rural Alabamians with special concern for children, the elderly, minorities and
other medically underserved vulnerable populations.
Alabama Department of Public Health and the Black
Belt Commission Partnership
ADPH's mission is to provide caring, high-quality and
professional services for the improvement and protection of the public's
health. This is achieved through disease prevention and the assurance of public
health services to resident and transient populations of the state regardless
of social circumstances or the ability to pay.
The Alabama Black Belt consists of a group of
primarily agricultural counties, with dark rich soil, extending east to west
across Central Alabama. It is the mission of the Black Belt Action Commission
to measurably improve the quality of life in Alabama's Black Belt region by
actively working with all citizens of Alabama and any other supportive parties.
Because many of the same individuals and institutions
were involved with both ADPH's State Planning Grant IDEA Project and the BBAC,
a partnership between the two became an efficient mechanism to support the work
of both entities. To this end, this web site was created and is maintained.
The planning and development of the website was
spearheaded by Chad Nichols (Governor's Office, Health Committee Project
Manager), Fern Shinbaum (Alabama Department of Public Health, IDEA Project
Director), Suzanne Respess (Children's Health System), John Pickens (Alabama
Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, Inc.), and Danne Howard (Alabama Hospital
Association).
The content on the
HealthInsurance.Alabama.gov
web site has been developed and adapted from several online resources and
organization Websites that provide health insurance information to consumers
and/or employers. These resources include
TexasHealthOptions.com, an
online resource of the Texas Department of Insurance, America's Health
Insurance Plans, (www.ahip.org), Association
of Health Research and Quality (www.ahrq.org), A Guide to Health Insurance
Options for Small Businesses in Virigina (InsureMoreViriginians.org), Guide
to Health Insurance Options for Small Business (CoverTheUninsured.org), a guide for
small businesses developed by the Healthcare Leadership Council with a grant
from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and
HealthcareCoverageGuide.org,
an online resource developed by the California Healthcare Foundation to provide
independent, unbiased information to help small businesses determine if health
insurance is right for their situations and information from the Alabama
Department of Insurance.
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