Aetna is going to kick some diseased butt

Good news for public health advocates:

Aetna officials on Wednesday announced plans to expand the number of disease management programs offered by the company from six to 30, the Hartford Courant reports. Aetna currently offers disease management programs for asthma, chronic heart failure, coronary artery disease, diabetes, end-stage renal disease and lower back pain. Under the expansion, Aetna will begin to offer disease management programs for conditions such as cancer, HIV, hypertension, migraines, peptic ulcers, rheumatoid arthritis, sickle cell disease and stroke. Aetna will group the disease management programs into categories such as pulmonary, orthopedic, oncology, "neuro" and gastrointestinal under the name Aetna Health Connections.

This makes me very happy.

Comments

[WITY]

What reasons do we have to think that's Aetna's "expansion" of DM programs isn't a shell game? Are they really building out end-to-end nurse-facilitated DM programs for 24 additional conditions or are they renaming things they're already doing anyway?

More important, is another DM program (let alone another 24) really what we need? Do DM programs address the root causes of failures of health? And isn't it time to start addressing the health care crisis at the root cause level, i.e. the level at which we come to understand that the health care crisis is really a crisis of much broader contexts?