2008stateofthestate

Governor Spitzer delivers State of the State Address

HEALTH SECTION OF
STATE OF THE STATE ADDRESS
JANUARY 9, 2008

To make New York the best place to live, work, raise a family, and run a business, we must also have quality health care that
families, businesses – and our State – can afford.

Last year, we cut Medicaid spending for the first time in nearly a decade, without reducing patient benefits, and we began the long
journey to universal coverage. We will never be able to grow the way we need to until we control burgeoning health care costs.
Working parents should be able to afford insurance for their children. And when the State is buying, we need to pay for the right
care at the right price in the right medical setting. And we must invest not only in treatment and cures, but also in prevention.

HEALTH CARE FOR EVERY CHILD

Of the 2.6 million uninsured New Yorkers, 400,000 of them are children – more than the populations of Rochester, Binghamton
and Albany combined. Hard-working parents simply can’t afford to buy their children health insurance. The result is no care for
our children, which is unacceptable, or expensive, sporadic care in our emergency rooms, which is unsustainable.

Senator Schumer is here today, and I want to recognize that he, along with Senator Clinton, fought tirelessly in the Senate this
year to expand our federal commitment to children’s health coverage. They were blocked by the President, and a minority of
Senators.

At the state level, despite our efforts to make it affordable for parents to get health coverage for their children, the Bush
Administration looked at our plan and said to us, as they said to Senator Schumer, “no.” The administration may feel that a family
with two working parents who each earn $40,000 is so wealthy that they should be all on their own when it comes to covering
kids, but I, for one, do not. “No” is the one thing we’re not going to take for an answer.

We cannot wait while children who suffer from asthma and diabetes go untreated. We will not wait while, tonight, some children
in this very city go to the emergency room for illnesses that could have been prevented if they had a regular family doctor. Not on
my watch. Not on our watch.

In my upcoming Executive Budget, I will propose that New York State fully fund the expansion of our Children’s Health
Insurance Program. I know many in this chamber care passionately about this issue and will join me. There will be affordable
coverage for every single child in this State.

MAKING HEALTH CARE AFFORDABLE FOR THE REST OF NEW YORK: RATIONALIZING OUR REIMBURSEMENT
SYSTEM

As we move toward universal health care, we must also take steps to make health care more affordable for every family and every
business in New York. That means refocusing our health care system so that it delivers more affordable, and more effective,
primary and preventive care. Avoiding illness is not only better medicine, it is better financial policy. Waiting for a medical crisis,
waiting for a trip to the emergency room, costs us much more.

Our best tool for this is to change reimbursement rates, encouraging prevention and primary care. Outdated reimbursement
systems pay too much for some hospital-based procedures that technology has now made routine, and too little for primary and
preventive care that should be routine. If we want to lower costs and increase quality, we must start paying for the right care in
the right setting at the right price, and I will propose that we do so.

We must also bring our health care system out of the digital dark ages. In 2008, there is no reason that we cannot have secure
electronic health records, whether on a card or online. Old paper records that are hard to find and hard to transfer are no way
either to provide good care or to control costs.
As we move forward with our long-term agenda for health care reform by covering all children and rationalizing our
reimbursement system, we must also address the shortage of doctors in many parts of our state and the epidemic of chronic
disease among our children.

DOCTORS ACROSS NEW YORK

There are huge regions of New York where doctors are scarce. From our inner cities to the North Country, our medically
underserved New Yorkers deserve better. To attract doctors to these communities, we’re going to create a “Peace Corps” for
doctors. Young people who go into medicine want to treat, to heal and to care. But often they must balance their desire to serve
where they are needed most with the obligation to pay their loans. We can solve both problems at once.

I propose the creation of “Doctors Across New York.” We will offer grants to help repay education loans and find other ways to
make it appealing for doctors to move to our State’s medically underserved areas. There should be a family doctor, and there will
be, for every family in New York.

INVESTING IN STEM CELL RESEARCH

As our health care reforms embrace common sense, they must also embrace the cutting edge. Last year, working together with
both houses of the Legislature and guided by the leadership of Lieutenant Governor Paterson, we created a $600 million Stem Cell
Research Fund. He and I share the belief that, yes, stem cell research is an economic development opportunity, but it is also a
moral imperative. I am pleased to report that, this week, the first round of grants went out, making New York’s stem cell fund the
fastest in the country to go from green light to grantmaking. In this chamber, we put our differences aside in favor of the
common good, and as a result, New York can blaze a national path toward health, and hope.

MANAGING CHRONIC DISEASES IN CHILDREN

As we seek to cure disease through the most advanced technology, we must also seek to prevent it through basic public health.
Through structural and environmental changes, we have prevented horrible diseases, whether it was modern sewers and clean
water systems to beat dysentery and cholera, universal vaccination to beat smallpox and polio, or battling lung cancer by making
smoking more expensive and inconvenient. Each time, a social change based on sound public health practice helped us take aim at
a killer. It is time to do the same for heart disease and diabetes.

We know we can dramatically reduce heart disease and Type II diabetes through diet and exercise, but we won’t be able to if we
continue to lose the battle against childhood obesity. In New York, one in four children is obese, and that number is rising. Left
unchanged, we are sentencing a huge number of our children to a lifetime of serious illness, and I want to thank Assemblyman
Felix Ortiz for his foresight. Felix, some were dismissive when you began on this road. No longer.

So let’s bridge our differences and pass the Healthy Schools Act to take junk food out of schools. We will ask Comptroller
DiNapoli to help enforce the State’s strong, but widely ignored, physical education requirements by including them in his regular
school district audits. And I have directed the Department of Health, which has now begun gathering data, to report to me
annually on our progress.

We must also make a commitment to women’s health. Given the continued efforts at the federal level to dismantle protections for
women’s reproductive health and privacy, I ask you to pass the Reproductive Health and Privacy Protection Act.

We also know that the best caregiver is often a loved one. This year, I will ask again that you enact a paid family leave bill. It is
unfair to ask hard-working New Yorkers to choose between economic security and caring for a loved family member.

That is our plan for health care. We will begin in earnest the struggle to prevent diabetes and heart disease. We will rewrite our 25
year-old payment system to encourage primary and preventive care, and we will start bringing our technology into the 21st
century. We will continue to take steps to assure that there is quality, affordable health care for every New Yorker, starting with
every child in the state, and a family doctor near every family.

20 Corporate Woods Blvd.
Suite 602
Albany, New York 12211
ph: 518-465-0044
fax: 518-465-3219
alt: 800-255-2100
nysdf@nysdental.org