Unsilent Generation

Entries from February 2010

GOP to the Unemployed: Drop Dead (You Bums)

February 27, 2010 · 10 Comments

Tomorrow, unemployment benefits will officially end for hundreds of thousands of Americans, thanks to maneuverings by Senate Republicans to prevent a vote that would have extended those benefits. Unless the extension is passed soon, some 1.1 million of the nation’s unemployed will see their unemployment expire in the coming month, and 5 million will lose benefits by June. 

The House finally voted to extend benefits on Thursday, after several days of stalling and posturing. But in the Senate, the measure was blocked by Kentucky’s Jim Bunning. Politico reported that late into Thursday night, Bunning held out against repeated Democratic attempts to pass the extension by unanimous consent. In response to entreaties from colleagues across the aisle, other Republican senators rose to defend Bunning’s right to obstruct the vote, and Bunning himself was heard to utter, “Tough shit.”  

Bunning said he wanted to see the cost of the benefits offset by other savings, to keep from adding to the deficit. But earlier in the week, Nevada Republican Congressman Dean Heller offered another objection to extending unemployment benefits: He believes it might create a nation of bums.

Think Progress relayed Heller’s remarks, which were made at a Republican Party function in Elko, Nevada, and reported in the local paper:

Heller said the current economic downturn and policies may bring back the hobos of the Great Depression, people who wandered the country taking odd jobs. He said a study found that people who are out of work longer than two years have only a 50 percent chance of getting back into the workforce.

“I believe there should be a federal safety net,” Heller said, but he questioned the wisdom of extending unemployment benefits yet again to a total of 24 months, which Congress is doing. “Is the government now creating hobos?” he asked.

Heller doesn’t seem bothered by the fact that he hails from a state with one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates–now more than 13 percent–as well as its highest foreclosure rate. In his speech, he managed to blame everything on the Democrats. “Six percent of Americans believe the stimulus package created jobs. More Americans believe Elvis is still alive,” he said. Never mind that the extended unemployment benefits Heller derided are in fact among the most effective components the stimulus package, according to the Congressional Budget Office, producing  $1.90 in growth for every $1 spent. 

What makes Heller’s statement really stupid, of course, is that people could become hobos if Congress doesn’t extend unemployment benefits, rather than if they do. Modest as they are, these weekly benefits are what’s keeping thousands–and perhaps millions–of families out of  poverty. The benefits that expire first are for people who have been out of work the longest, and are most likely to be living close to the edge already. 

The same is true for the other social safety net programs that Republicans tend to despise. For example, without Social Security, according to the Alliance for Retired Americans, ”55% of severely disabled workers and their families would live in poverty; 47% of elderly households would live in poverty; another 1.3 million children would fall into poverty; and 2.4 million grandparent-headed households caring for 4.5 million grandchildren would be deprived of [their] most important source of income.” Yet Social Security, too, has long been under attack by conservatives–a position that’s lately gained bipartisan ground, as reflected in Obama’s bipartisan “debt commission,” which is aimed at reducing entitlements.

The heydey of hobos was during the Great Depression, before the New Deal began to weave the social safety net. If Nelson and his fellow Republicans want to see Americans riding the rails, living in tent cities, and lining up at soup kitchens (even more than they already are), all they have to do is keep tearing that safety net apart.

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Categories: Congressional Democrats · Congressional Republicans · Great Depression · Obama Administration · Social Security · budget / tax policy · economy · financial crisis / recession · jobs / employment / unemployment · poverty · right wing
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Obama’s New Health Care Plan

February 23, 2010 · 2 Comments

Readers whose heads already are spinning in an attempt to figure out the President’s new health care reform scheme might start with these basic facts: The plan essentially relies on middle-class tax cuts and supposed new-found competition through a system of exchanges along the lines now offered federal employees.

Of course, people with no health insurance often don’t have the insurance because they don’t have the money to buy it. These same people would need cash to purchase insurance, not tax credits on their nonexistent or drastically reduced income. And then, too, this exchange system and its supposed beneficial competition doesn’t mean lower costs. It just adds mind boggling confusion over what policies to pick. The exchange is like having to pick through a vast assortment of candy in a vending machine. Is a traditional Hershey bar a better deal than a bag of M&Ms?

Finally, it should be remembered the federal employees are nowadays  paying more for insurance, not less. Is this just another version of the game of smoke and mirrors the Congress and Obama administration are laying on us?

Nonetheless, some think the Obama plan spells real change–at least, enough to make it worth supporting.  Robert Greenstein,who heads the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal Washington, DC-based think tank that tracks social safety net issues, released a statement this afternoon in support of the president’s  plan. Greenstein Makes these points:

  • It makes insurance more affordable than under the Senate bill for families and individuals with incomes… between $29,000 and $88,000 for a family of four. Most people with incomes below 133 percent of the poverty line would qualify for Medicaid, which does not charge premiums and requires only modest co-payments.
     
  • It extends important consumer protections to existing employer-based and individual market plans — for instance, giving enrollees the option of keeping their adult children covered under their policy until the children reach age 26, prohibiting annual and lifetime benefit limits, and, by 2018, requiring coverage of preventive services without co-payment charges.
     
  • It completely closes the gap in Medicare prescription drug coverage (the “doughnut hole”) over the next decade.
     
  • It fixes shortcomings in the Senate bill’s excise tax…..the vast majority of plans would not face any tax. 
  • It strengthens oversight of insurance companies, makes the “playing field” more level between firms that offer insurance and those that don’t, contains stronger mechanisms to reduce Medicare overpayments to insurance companies, adds new policies to fight fraud, waste, and abuse in both Medicare and Medicaid, and closes several egregious corporate tax loopholes.
  • It offsets the loss in revenue (relative to the Senate bill) from these excise tax changes by broadening the base of the Medicare tax — that is, by applying the tax to capital gains, dividend, and other investment income received by people with incomes of over $250,000 a year. This raises substantial revenue while affecting only about the top 2 percent of Americans. 
  • It increases federal financial support for state Medicaid programs and makes that support more equitable across the states.

You can read the full statement here.

Categories: Congress · Obama Administration · health care · health insurance industry
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How the FDA Helps Big Pharma Keep Drug Prices High

February 20, 2010 · Leave a Comment

The Obama administration and members of Congress are gnashing their teeth over the price tag for health care reform, and the White House has launched a commission to cut Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security–the ”entitlements” that are supposedly bankrupting the country. But why does health care cost so much in this United States? We find one clue buried in Saturday’s papers–and it’s got nothing to do with old people or poor people.

Here, in a speech reported by the New York Times, Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg, the head of the FDA, describes how the government participates in running up Big Pharma’s profits by slowing approval of generic drugs. These delays give the brand name manufacturers more time to sell their more expensive versions. Over the last year, prices of brand name drugs have been rising sharply, keeping Big Pharma’s profits high. The Times reports:

The delays, caused by a growing backlog of applications at the Food and Drug Administration may be costing consumers and the federal government hundreds of millions of dollars a year as they continue in some cases to pay for name-brand drugs even after their patents expire, industry analysts said.

The new head of the F.D.A. says she means to speed up the process.

“It’s a real problem,” Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg, the F.D.A. commissioner, told an audience this week at the annual meeting here of the Generic Pharmaceutical Association ,an industry trade group. “I don’t pretend to believe that the status quo is acceptable.”

Saying the F.D.A.’s generic drugs department was underfunded, Dr. Hamburg noted a potential remedy: placing application fees on companies seeking approval for generic drugs.

Five years ago, the F.D.A. typically approved a new generic drug within 16.3 months of the application’s filing, according to a report from the agency on Tuesday. But by last year, with limited staff to review an increasing number of applications, approvals for new generic drugs were taking 26.7 months, the report said.

Categories: Obama Administration · corporations · drug industry · health care
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Obama’s Stealth Entitlement Commission

February 19, 2010 · 7 Comments

Less than a month after the Senate rejected a proposal for a bipartisan entitlement commission, President Obama has created his own version by executive order. It is not, of course, called an “entitlement commission”–that unsavory term has been banished from the political lexicon, since it clearly frightens the geezers. Instead, it is called the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. (Who wouldn’t support that?) The shorthand names are the “deficit commission” and the “debt panel.” This last term is remarkably similar to the much-maligned “death panels”–which seems appropriate, since its primary purpose is to pull the plug on old-age entitlements. Despite protestations to the contrary, the commission exists primarily to make cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

The commission’s slant is evident from the choice of its two co-chairs: former Wyoming Republican senator Alan Simpson, a long-time foe of entitlements, and Erskine Bowles, the middle- right former Clinton chief of staff. The rest of the 18-member commission will include 6 Republican and 6 Democratic members of Congress, and four more members named by Obama. They are supposed to make a report and recommendations to the president in December, after the fall elections, and Obama is expected to forward the recommendations to Congress.

In the best-case scenario, Congress will do the same thing it has done with all of Obama’s other proposed reforms–i.e. nothing. Because if it acts at all, it will almost certainly decide to pay down the deficit at the expense of the social safety net. While Social Security may be the proverbial “third rail” of politics, the other debt-reducing options–raising taxes on the rich, or making corporations pay their fair share–will be seen as even more deadly in the current political climate.

An aggressive move to cut entitlements is, of course, a long-cherished conservative goal. The Heritage Foundation has been promoting the idea for decades, and was a major cheerleader for creation of a Congressional entitlement commission. Billionaire anti-entitlement activist Pete Peterson has bankrolled a huge lobbying effort for a commission that could ready the cuts, then ram them through Congress on a fast track yes or no vote. When that idea ran into heavy opposition in the Senate, Obama came up with his comparatively toothless version.

The driving force behind the commission—in addition to Peterson’s determined lobbying– is a group of conservative Blue Dog Democrats, some of whom would most likely be just as happy to see Social Security privatized. They will likely join with Republicans to support cuts in Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.

This same alliance will also be key to a scaled-back health care reform, which looks to bypass altogether the so-called liberals in Congress. Instead, it depends upon senior conservatives in the Republican party, led by retiring New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg. Gregg has said he thinks the health care system needs changing, and he wants to engage in “constructive dialogue” with the president on reform. But any plan Gregg champions will have to be relatively meager and inexpensive. The fiscally conservative Gregg  joined with Democrat Kent Conrad to support the Congressional version of a debt commission, and he now seems to making common cause with the perennial Democratic health care compromiser, Max Baucus.

The long and the short of this situation is that  the Democratic administration, along with a small group of conservative Democrats in Congress, may make considerable headway toward doing what neither Ronald Reagan nor George W. Bush was able to pull off. They will likely make cuts to Social Security, while at the same time advancing Obama’s government-subsidized “automatic IRA” scheme, which would divert people’s earnings into 401K-style retirement accounts. These, of course, would be invested by Wall Street, helping to rebuild the finance industry. So in the end, we could see a de facto privatization of a portion of Social Security–the ultimate conservative dream, brought to us by the Democrats.

By the same token, the Democratic-led health care reform is likely to bring about some cuts to Medicare and Medicaid–the only single-payer health care this nation has ever known. It will do so while preserving the power and wealth of the health care profiteers who are largely responsible for skyrocketing costs.  The corporations, once again, are set to emerge victorious.

Meanwhile, the old, sick, disabled, and poor, who rely on entitlement programs, will bear the weight of the national debt. The low- and middle-income people still reeling from the recession–who need more, not less, government spending–will be left out in the cold, victims of what the Center for Economic and Policy Research calls “the deficit hawks who distract the public and policy makers from the policies necessary to bring the economy back to full employment.” 

The people and policies responsible for running up the deficit look like the only ones who won’t be taking a hit. In a report released on Wednesday called “Where Today’s Large Deficits Come From,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities added up the numbers and found: “In fact, the tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the economic downturn together explain virtually the entire deficit over the next ten years.”

Categories: 2010 elections · Bush Administration · Congress · Congressional Democrats · Congressional Republicans · Obama Administration · Social Security · Wall Street / financial industry · budget / tax policy · corporations · economy · financial crisis / recession · health care · health insurance industry · jobs / employment / unemployment · lobbying · pensions / retirement funds · poverty
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Pfizer: Enemy of the People

February 17, 2010 · 1 Comment

Last summer and fall the drugsters were falling all over each other, backslapping about what a wonderful bunch of guys work at Big Pharma. By promising to pony up billions to help Obama put his health reform together, they were being so, you know,  all for the community.

They failed to mention reports of how big Pfizer was happily raking in tons of cash while it was raising prices. And now, USA Today says that contrary to publc opinion, Pfizer was working against the legislation, not for it. Read this:

Drugmaker Pfizer‘s political action committee gave less last year, but the analysis shows that nearly 60% of the money it donated to members of Congress during the first 11 months of 2009 went to lawmakers who voted against the health care bills. 

Florida Rep. Allen Boyd, a fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrat who opposed the House health care bill, received more money from Pfizer’s PAC last year than any other lawmaker. The Blue Dog Coalition was a key voting bloc in last year’s health care debate and helped force limits on a government-run insurance option to which many heath industry groups objected.Boyd spokesman Christopher Cashman said the congressman receives “broad and diverse” financial support and “bases his vote on how the policy will impact the people of North Florida and our country as a whole.”

Pfizer spokeswoman Kristen Neese told USA Today the company “is a longtime supporter of health care reform” and PAC contributions should “not be viewed as representative of one issue.”

Yeh. Right

Categories: corporations · drug industry · health care · lobbying
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Health Insurers Rake in Mammoth Profits

February 12, 2010 · 2 Comments

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont reported today that the five largest health insurance companies posted $12.2 billion in profits last year, 56 percent more than 20008.

In a study of public records Health Care for America Now  found that WellPoint Inc., UnitedHealth Group, Cigna Corp., Aetna Inc. and Humana Inc. covered 2.7 million fewer people than they did the year before.  Some of the insurers actually cut the proportion of premiums that went to medical care and put more into salaries and profits. 

WellPoint’s profit margin of 7.2 percent was the highest of the five big insurers.  Anthem Blue Cross, a California subsidiary of WellPoint, has come under fire for jacking up premiums by as much as 39 percent this year on some individual health policies.

Categories: health care · health insurance industry
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Private Hospitals Rip-Off Medicare for Sickest Patients

February 10, 2010 · Leave a Comment

The New York Times today has an article about the lack of oversight at what are called long-term care hospitals, and another about the largest of the corporations that runs these hospitals, called Select Medical Corporation. According to the Times, more than 400 of these hospitals “have opened nationally in the last 25 years. Few of them have doctors on staff, and most are owned by for-profit companies.” While they take patients of all ages who need “acute long-term care,” these facilities hold a lot of older people, and survive almost entirely by getting top-dollar from Medicare for providing questionable care.

Lawsuits, state inspection reports and statistics deep in federal reports paint a troubling picture of the care offered at some Select hospitals, and at long-term care hospitals in general.

In 2007 and 2008, Select’s hospitals were cited at a rate almost four times that of regular hospitals for serious violations of Medicare rules, according to an analysis by The New York Times. Other long-term care hospitals were cited at a rate about twice that of regular hospitals.

Long-term care hospitals also had a higher incidence of bedsores and infections than regular hospitals in 2006, the most recent year for which federal data is available.

Fewer than 10 hospitals dedicated to long-term care existed in the early 1980s, according to Medicare officials. But many such hospitals have sprouted since then, driven by Medicare rules that offer high payments for hospitals that treat patients for an average of 25 days or more. Long-term care hospitals now treat about 200,000 patients a year, including 130,000 Medicare patients — at a projected cost of $4.8 billion to the government this year, up from $400 million in 1993….

Despite the rapid expansion of long-term care hospitals and the serious illnesses they treat, Medicare has never closely examined their care. Unlike traditional hospitals, Medicare does not penalize them financially if they fail to submit quality data.

Supporters of long-term hospitals say that even without staff physicians, they provide high-quality care and play an important role by treating patients who are too sick for nursing homes but are not improving at traditional hospitals. Hospital intensive care units help patients survive acute illnesses, heart attacks and trauma, but they are not intended to treat patients for weeks or months.

Of course, traditional hospitals can move those patients to regular medical wards for treatment. But under Medicare payment rules, traditional hospitals often lose money on patients who stay for long periods. So they have a financial incentive to discharge patients to long-term hospitals, which then receive new Medicare payments for admitting the patients. Both hospitals benefit financially.

That dynamic, rather than evidence that long-term hospitals benefit patients, has driven their expansion, said Dr. Jeremy M. Kahn of the University of Pennsylvania, who has received a federal grant to study the hospitals. The industry’s growth is an example of how health care companies can exploit the $450 billion Medicare program, he added.

A companion piece in the Times is called “Trail of Disquieting Reports From Hospitals of Select Medical.” “Disquieting” is a nice word for the examples the article provides of what passes for care in these places, funded by our tax dollars.

Categories: Medicare · corporations · health care
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Time for Hell’s Grannies to Ride Again

February 10, 2010 · Leave a Comment

This is not a good time to be old in America. In addition to dealing with the usual burdens of aging–our aches and pains, and our worries about senility and death–we now have to contend with a backlash against the supposedly greedy geezers who insist upon clinging to life in definance of the public good.

On one side, we have pundits like David Brooks babbling on about old people stealing the nation’s wealth, and billionaire geezer-basher Pete Peterson bankrolling a campaign for an “entitlement commission” to cut Medicare and Social Security. Why should we expect a government handout just because we’ve worked and paid taxes all our lives? (Never mind that Wall Street has already decimated our retirement savings and home values.)

On the other side we have the champions of age-based health care rationing, led by “ethicists” like Daniel Callaghan, trying to convince us to go gently into that good night, while our corrupt system of medicine for profit goes on unrestrained. How would you like to be denied a kidney transplant or even a new hip, on the grounds of enlightened “cost-benefit analysis,” while the drug and insurance companies continue to rake in their profits?

It’s no wonder elders around the world are taking matters into their own hands. The only thing that’s surprising about the German geezer gang described in yesterday’s post is that it doesn’t happen more often. You hear about other incidents every now and then: an oldsters’ crime wave in Japan, or an octogenarian bank robber with an oxygen tank in San Diego. Maybe soon we’ll be seeing more elderly sapper gangs in action.

In the meantime, a reader dropped me a line last night with a reminder that there is indeed a precedent for all this, deftly portrayed by Monty Python. Seems to me that it might be time for Hell’s Grannies to ride again.

Categories: Medicare · Social Security · age discrimination · death / end of life care and choices · economy · generations / intergenerational issues · pensions / retirement funds · radical geezers
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German Geezer Gang Kidnaps Financial Advisor Who Lost Their Money

February 9, 2010 · 2 Comments

The British Daily Mail today reports on what it calls a “gang of Old Rage Pensioners” in Bavaria who are accused of kidnapping and assaulting their financial adviser because, they said, he had “taken us for a ride.”

Keep in mind that this colorful account is from a British tabloid: Terms like “torture” are there for sensational effect, the events are still under contention, and none of the geezers has yet been convicted. According to NPR’s “The World,” the old people are charged with abduction and grievous bodily harm–the latter, apparently, for injuries caused when they hit the financial advisor with their walkers.

The four German seniors said they were so incensed over the losses that American-born investment specialist James Amburn incurred that they hatched the plan to kidnap him in a bid to get their cash back. They are charged along with an accomplice of kidnapping, illegally confining and causing grievous bodily harm to Amburn, 56.

But the court also heard that Amburn himself is now under investigation by authorities in Karlsruehe for suspected fraud.

Amburn was ambushed outside his home in Speyer, west Germany, where he was bound with masking tape and bundled into the boot of a car after being hit over the head with the walking frame of one of his kidnappers.

Prosecutors charged the two married couples, aged between 60 and 79, as well as the co-conspirator, with carrying out the kidnapping in order to recoup losses amounting to £2.3 million in investments that soured due to the international financial downturn.

According to the prosecutors, kidnappers, Roland Koenig, 74, and Willy Dehmer, 60, attacked Amburn outside his home and bundled him into an oversize cardboard box which they wheeled to the boot of a silver Audi saloon car.

He was driven 300 miles to a house on the shores of beautiful Lake Chiemsee in Bavaria – but not before escaping at a service station. His elderly abductors recaptured him and beat him with the walking frame, causing Amburn two broken ribs.

The court in Traunstein heard prosecutors describe the kidnapping and torture as ‘almost surreal–except it happened.’

For four days Amburn was kept in the cellar of the house in June last year, beaten and tortured by the pensioners who saw their comfortable retirement dreams evaporating before their eyes.

Another couple, retired doctors Gerhard and Iris Fell, aged 63 and 66, who arrived to assist the kidnappers, admitted their roles in the plot. Mr Fell was not in court due to illness.

Koenig and his wife Sieglinde, 79, made a partial admission but he, bizarrely, told the court that Amburn was there ‘willingly.’ He said he and the others had met Amburn in Florida in the 1990′s and they possessed holiday homes in the state. ‘He said he was a business adviser and promised us yields of 18 percent on our savings,’ he told the court. ’At first that happened–but then he took the p**s.’

They met up co-incidentally with Dehmer who told them Amburn owed him $690,000. Together, say prosecutors, the plan coalesced to ‘teach him a lesson.’

‘The fear of death was indescribable,’ Amburn said, adding that he was beaten and tortured during four days of captivity in a cellar room where he was held naked. 

He was rescued when he was ordered to send a fax to release funds from a Swiss bank and managed to scribble a message on it for the recipient to call police. He said: ‘I told them that if I sold certain securities in Switzerland they could get their money and for this I had to send a fax to a bank.’

Allowed out of the cellar for a cigarette break in the garden while the kidnappers awaited their loot, Amburn attempted to escape over a wall. In the pouring rain he ran down the street pursued by his captors in the Audi A8 they had used to transport him to the house. Several people saw him, but Roland Koening shouted: ‘He’s a burglar!’

Amburn was then dragged back to the cellar.  Shortly afterwards, the Swiss bank telephoned police in Germany and a team of armed commandos stormed the house.

His captors now face a minimum of five years in jail each when the trial concludes in March. Their lawyer Harald Baumgaertl insisted before the court that his clients were not ‘big criminals.’ But the prosecution disagreed, saying they showed a ‘high degree of criminal energy.’

Categories: Wall Street / financial industry · legal issues · pensions / retirement funds · radical geezers
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States Launch Their Own Health Care Reforms

February 9, 2010 · Leave a Comment

For those of you totally fed up with  health care reform–now threatening to drag on with Obama’s tiresome face-to-face debate theatrics–some small relief may come from the states, which have begun to take reform into their own hands. Some of these initiatives are for the good; some look pretty bad. In either case these initiatives are bound to make matters at the federal level more complicated, with members of Congress rushing around trying to harmonize state and federal policy–but at least they might make something happen.

The Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report this morning posted a starting list of some initiatives, and they’re well worth taking a look at. They run the gamut from a Democratic proposal in California for a single payer system to self-insurance in Philadelphia.

Politico: “State lawmakers in at least three dozen states are pushing ahead with a series of measures aimed at pre-empting whatever might come out of Washington,” reports Politico. “On the left, Democrats in the California Senate recently approved a measure to establish a state-run, single-payer health care system favored by liberals on Capitol Hill. And on the right, conservatives in Virginia and other states are pushing legislation to stave off federal efforts to mandate that individuals secure insurance coverage or require businesses to provide it.” 

Columbia Missourian: “The Missouri Senate spent nearly all of its session time Monday on resolutions that would urge the state’s attorney general to sue the federal government for legislation that may never see the light of day in the U.S. Congress,” says the Daily Missourian. The legislation would urge the state attorney general to join with “other state attorneys general in threatening a lawsuit against the federal government if a version of the health care reform is passed into law. The attorneys general, led by Henry McMaster of South Carolina, have said they would sue over a provision inserted into the U.S. Senate version of health reform that was designed to win the support of conservative U.S. Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb.” That language would have exempted Nebraska on a permanent basis “from funding the expansion of Medicaid that would be required under the proposed bill.”

Modern Healthcare on the rise of uninsured residents in Minnesota: “Less than 60% of Minnesotans had health insurance through an employer in 2009, which contributed to a notable increase in the number of residents without insurance in a state that typically has rates of coverage higher than national averages, a new study indicates. Authors of the Minnesota Health Access Survey said the results likely will serve as a preview of other state and national surveys because Minnesota is one of the first states to report academic findings on the rate of uninsured people for 2009.” The survey “found that the number of Minnesotans without insurance increased by 106,000 between 2007 and 2009, leaving the state’s uninsured rate at 9.1%, compared with 7.2% two years earlier.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports on efforts by the “Law Enforcement Health Benefits Inc., which oversees health-care benefits for Philadelphia police. LEHB and its administrator, Thomas Lamb, are roundly praised for aggressively reining in costs. … Even so, LEHB’s efforts cannot offset city health-care costs that are high relative to other employers’, mostly because Philadelphia employees pay little out of their own pockets. That leaves taxpayers shouldering health-care costs that jumped 123 percent from 2001 to 2008, a period in which city revenue rose only 38 percent. … Starting in July, Lamb will be at the forefront of a new effort to control medical costs known as self-insurance. Instead of paying a premium to its insurer, Independence Blue Cross, LEHB, using city funds, will now pay claims as they come in. The city hopes to save about $5 million in fiscal 2001 because of the switch to self-insurance.”

St. Paul Pioneer Press:  A legislative effort “to rescue a state-run health care program for the poor took its first hesitant step Monday toward becoming law.” The measure, advanced by Sen. Linda Berglin, DFL-Minneapolis, is estimated to cost roughly $320 million and “would restore coverage, now set to expire at the end of March, for those earning less than $7,800 a year.” A companion measure is moving through the House. “The bill is on a fast track as one of the big early tests of the 2010 session. It passed out of the Senate’s Economic Development and Housing Budget Division on Monday, will be heard in the Senate’s Finance Committee today and is headed toward a vote Thursday on the floor of the Senate.” Kansas Health Institute: “Kansas is going to need more doctors to meet the growing needs of an aging population, officials here say. Meanwhile, the University of Kansas School of Medicine in Wichita has been successful training doctors who choose to remain in the state. Almost half its graduates have stayed in Kansas; the national average for retaining medical school graduates is 29 percent. With the aim of turning out more graduates, university officials here have long wanted to convert the Wichita campus to a four-year school. It’s a two-year program, now.”

Categories: Congress · Obama Administration · health care · health insurance industry
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