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With all of the national debate of the US Senate's proposed Healthcare plan, another voice is added to the opposition. Indiana Governor, Mitch Daniels, has voiced his displeasure with part of the bill. Part of the bill increases the availability of Medicaid to those of lower income that need healthcare insurance. In letters to Indiana Senators Evan Bayh and Richard Lugar, Gov. Daniels has said, the new bill will increase Indiana's spending for the program at an estimate of 2.3 billion over the next 10 years. The estimate was given by Milliman, an Indianapolis actuarial firm. Gov. Daniels had privatized...

The "healthc-care reform" bills in Congress would hit 39 states hard with new expenses, by raising Medicaid eligibility above the cur rent income cutoffs. The only states that won't have to raise eligibility because of the Senate bill are Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Vermont and Wisconsin (plus the District of Columbia). And the House bill would force even Massachusetts and Vermont to pay more. Hardest hit would be Texas ($2,750 million a year in extra state spending under the Senate bill), Pennsylvania ($1,450 million), California ($1,428 million) and Florida ($909 million). Who...

Reform: Only a Bernie Madoff could believe the Senate's health care bill will extend coverage to 31 million Americans while cutting deficits by $127 billion over 10 years. It would be the first profitable entitlement. But that's what Majority Leader Harry Reid, citing Congressional Budget Office estimates, tells us the 2,074-page bill — said to cost only $849 billion over a decade — would do. Like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, he seems to be following Vice President Joe Biden's admonition at an AARP town hall meeting that "we've got to spend money to keep from going bankrupt." We suspect Reid's...

McALLEN — There were no doctors, no patients or even a floor at a medical office on the city’s south side, but to Hidalgo County’s largest hospital system it was reputedly worth lease payments of $8,000 a month. The lease allegedly was a sham contract given to disguise an improper kickback to Eugenio Galindo, a McAllen doctor, a whistle-blower contended among his allegations in a lawsuit he filed accusing South Texas Health System of Medicare and Medicaid fraud. Galindo is one of seven Rio Grande Valley doctors whom the U.S. Department of Justice, which joined in the suit at the...

Jeffrey Anderson of the NRO health care blog Critical Condition points out an error in the Congressional Budget Office's estimates of how many Americans are uninsured: "By all accounts, the Congressional Budget Office is using the Census Bureau's tallies for the number of uninsured, but the CBO doesn't appear to have read the full Census report. In the very same document in which the now-famous number of 46 million uninsured appears, the Census admits that this number includes roughly 9 million people on Medicaid who were falsely recorded as uninsured. The CBO is not adjusting for this Medicaid undercount. Therefore,...

New York State is facing its worst economic crisis in decades - with projected annual budget gaps rising to more than $19.5 billion over the next four years. The challenge is to use this crisis to make New York stronger than ever, as we did during the New York City fiscal crisis in the 1970s, a rescue effort in which I was heavily involved. To do that, the state must approach the current situation more like a business. When confronted with a financial crisis, a responsible business focuses on its customers: What does the customer need? How can we provide...

... Maine is the Charlie Brown of health care. The state’s legislators have tried for decades to fix its system, but their efforts have always fallen short: health insurance premiums are still among the least affordable in the nation, health care spending per person is among the highest and hospital emergency rooms are among the most crowded. Indeed, many overhauls to the system have done little more than squeeze a balloon — solving one problem while worsening another. ... Maine’s history is a cautionary tale for national health reform. The state could never figure out how to slow the spiraling...

The president wants a massive health care overhaul. He also wants to keep it under $900 billion over the next ten years, and he wants it be deficit neutral. So, how do the Democrats plan on accomplishing all these things? It's through Enron style accounting. 1) Collect taxes and revenues in year one but don't begin to provide services until year three. The CBO has become the "gold standard". Everyone has treated it as the gospel. It's so called scoring system has flaws however. It only takes the first ten years of revenues and expenses. So, how did the Baucus...

The renowned Mayo Clinic is no longer accepting some Medicare and Medicaid patients, raising new questions about whether it is too selective to serve as a model for health-care reform. The White House has repeatedly held up for praise Mayo and other medical centers, many of which are in the Upper Midwest, that perform well in Dartmouth College rankings showing wide disparities in how much hospitals spend on Medicare patients. The model centers have capitalized on their status to insert into health-care legislation provisions that would result in higher Medicare payments for hospitals that do well on the Dartmouth rankings...

Minnesota and other states are worried that emerging plans to overhaul the nation's health care system could leave them facing a expensive new obligation to cover the poor without the money to pay for it. As the health care debate speeds toward a climax in Congress, cash-strapped state officials are running the numbers to gauge the impact on their budgets, which are already bleeding red ink from hard economic times. Minnesota's two U.S. senators, both Democrats, are taking notice. In a letter last week to Senate Democratic leaders, Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken expressed general support for health care...

The estimate includes a projected net cost of $518 billion over 10 years for the proposed expansions in insurance coverage. That net cost itself reflects a gross total of $829 billion in credits and subsidies provided through the exchanges, increased net outlays for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and tax credits for small employers; those costs are partly offset by $201 billion in revenues from the excise tax on high-premium insurance plans and $110 billion in net savings from other sources. The net cost of the coverage expansions would be more than offset by the combination of...

Sole Control - Sen. Harry Reid will write the bill himself taking pieces of the Baucus vapor bill and the Kennedy "Do it for Ted" bill. This merger will happen with a few chosen people behind tightly closed doors. There will be no hearing, no testimony, no public input.

ONE top argument for national health insurance turns out to be based on a false assumption. We've long been told that it's the uninsured who are clogging hospital ERs. Turns out that it's actually Medicaid and other insured patients behind most misuse of emergency-room care. Which means that health-care "reform" would make the problem worse. ERs are indeed dangerously overcrowded; having worked in a busy city ER for more than a decade, I can tell you that the "extra" patients interfere seriously with basic care. But the solution doesn't involve giving more people insurance coverage -- it requires turning more...

Hello my FReeper friends, I am trying to educate myself regarding Medicare and Medicaid to find out the reality of the state of healthcare in the USA. I went to Wikipedia and typed in MEDICAID and right there in the first paragraph, I read this : Medicaid is the United States health program for eligible individuals and families with low incomes and resources. It is a means-tested program that is jointly funded by the states and federal government, and is managed by the states.[1] Among the groups of people served by Medicaid are certain eligible U.S. citizens and resident aliens,...

The nation's governors are emerging as a formidable lobbying force as health-care reform moves through Congress and states overburdened by the recession brace for the daunting prospect of providing coverage to millions of low-income residents. The legislation the Senate Finance Committee is expected to approve calls for the biggest expansion of Medicaid since its creation in 1965. Under the Senate bill and the House proposal, a state-federal insurance program targeted mainly at children, pregnant women and disabled people would effectively become a Medicare for the poor, a health-care safety net for all people with an annual income below $14,404. Whether...

The government option? Government controlled co-op? Beware of fluffy, cutsie-pie nice sounding 1,500 page bill amendments attached in the dead of night. Government sucess stories: Social Security Medicare Medicaid The Veterans Administration Above are four government run healthcare systems well run, well administered and loved by doctors and hospitals. After four successes like the ones listed above, let’s let them have government take over one more program and control all private doctors and private insurance. After all, they’ll base the new system on their previous successes.

Americans expect to show a photo ID when they board a plane, enter many office buildings, cash a check or even rent a video -- but rarely in voting or applying for government benefits such as Medicaid. Many Democrats seem to view asking citizens for proof of identity as an invasion of privacy -- though what's really being protected is the right to commit identity fraud. Exhibit A is Tuesday's 13 to 10 party-line vote in the Senate Finance Committee rejecting a proposal to require that immigrants prove their identity when signing up for federal health care programs. Chuck Grassley,...

On June 5, 2008, the Starr family's life changed forever. Patrick Starr, father of two and a softball fanatic, was playing his favorite sport when he collided with another player and fell backward, striking his head on the field. The impact caused brain damage that put the Pasadena man into a coma, in which he has remained ever since. Now his wife of 16 years, Beth, is prepared to let him go - but she wanted to be sure she and their children Ashleigh, 15, and Zachary, 8, are financially secure first. "That's what he would want," she said. Starr...

Free Speech: The Senate votes against transparency as the administration silences a private insurer for exposing the president's health care proposal. Meanwhile, AARP is allowed to tout reform as it awaits payday. We weren't surprised when the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday voted 12 to 11 against allowing two weeks for the Congressional Budget Office to complete its cost analysis of the health care bill pushed by Montana Democrat Max Baucus and to put the bill online in its original wording. Instead, the Senate panel passed another amendment to require the committee to post the full bill online in "conceptual"...

Jonathan Blum, an acting director at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is apparently responsible for issuing a gag order against Humana, Inc., on Monday evening. Blum is a former staffer to Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee currently in markup of their own chopped salad version of the health care bill. Baucus has taken credit in the media for demanding CMS issue the unprecedented order.  CMS also changed their mailing guidelines to include a ban on any Medicare Advantage (MA) provider sending information or placing information on their websites regarding the non-partisan Congressional...

George Orwell call your office.  Again. Was it only two months ago that Cong. John Carter (R-Tx) and a few other conservatives were protesting the Democrats’ censorship of their constituent mailings? Yes, it was.  When  Judge Carter tried to describe Obamacare as “government-run healthcare� the House Franking Commission told him he couldn’t use the term in a constituent mailing that would be mailed for free as are most constituent mailings.  Not only could he not use those words, he couldn’t use the words “Democratic Party.�   Now, the Democratic Party (i.e., the Obama administration) wants to censor the mailings sent...

WASHINGTON — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid secured a deal today that would give Nevada full, 100 percent funding in the Senate health care bill for an initial expansion of Medicaid. The agreement reached with the committee chairman comes after Reid vowed last week to strike a better deal for Nevada before bringing any legislation to the floor. Reid took heat from Republican Rep. Nathan Deal of Georgia who bemoaned the majority leader’s powerful reach into Senate negotiations to improve the bill for Nevada. The deal would give Nevada full funding for the first five years of the program —...

Give President Obama credit for persistence. And stubbornness. And lack of imagination. He declared again last week that his health care plan "will slow the growth of health care costs for our families and our businesses and our government." And this historic achievement will be accompanied by a dazzling array of new medical benefits that everyone will receive--guaranteed by law. Okay, you've heard this before. But that's the president's story, and he's sticking to it. The question is, why? Does he think we're stupid? His argument has failed to persuade a sizeable majority of the American people precisely because they're...

Discourse: The reaction to the congressman's outburst shows what happens when you judge this president by the content of his character. In a post-racial presidency, charges of racism are the new last refuge of scoundrels.When Joe Wilson, the decorum-challenged South Carolina Republican, reacted to President Obama's assertion that there was nothing in health care legislation giving coverage to illegal aliens by shouting "You lie!" he knew, as his critics ignore, that there was nothing requiring proof of citizenship either. A nonpartisan Congressional Research Service study found that the House health care bill at that moment did not restrict illegal immigrants...

Senator Mike Enzi (R-WY) of Wyoming delivered the weekly Republican address Saturday on the loss of Senator Kennedy and the importance of getting health care reform done right. Senator Enzi discussed how the Democrats are rushing a health reform bill through congress that will ultimately "raid Medicare", raise costs and increase the deficit. And, he urged lawmakers to listen to what the American people are saying and scrap the Democrats’ current plan in order to "enact common sense reform that will actually cut costs." Here's the video: Senator Enzi: ObamaCare to Cut Billions from Elderly

TAMPA — Todd Cohen was diagnosed with bone cancer in 1994 when he was 19. The cancer led to the amputation of his right leg. Since then, Cohen has learned to walk with a prosthesis. He got an education, but he has never held a steady job. He's gotten by with Medicaid and monthly Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, checks that have ranged from $271 to $650.

Jeffrey H. Sloman, Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, and Bill McCollum, Florida Attorney General, announced that two Miami doctors have been convicted of Medicare and Medicaid fraud. A Miami jury returned guilty verdicts against Walter Proano and Manuel Barbeite late Friday afternoon. Sentencing has been scheduled before U.S. District Judge Patricia A. Seitz for October 29, 2009, starting at 8:30 a.m. Proano and Barbeite were convicted for their involvement in a scheme with Diagnostic Medical Choice, a Southwest Miami clinic that billed the Medicaid and Medicare programs for expensive infusion medications intended to treat a...

How do the party leadership and the president square this circle? They can't entirely, but they can go a long way toward doing so by using the so-called "reconciliation" procedure in the Senate, a budget-related mechanism that would allow the Democrats to pass much, though not all, of Obama's shifting wish list with a mere 50-vote simple majority. With that as the operative target, Senate leaders could move considerably leftward, while allowing butt-covering Senate Blue Dogs to shout "no" in the crowded theater. The leadership couldn't get the "public option," but they could sweeten the pot with generously-defined expansions of...

RUSH: This is a must-read written by an ordinary citizen. A Duke Professor Explains What the Health Care Bill Actually Says August 12, 2009 BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Now, what I have here is very long. I cannot read the entire thing. But there are summaries that I can read. This is a piece entitled, "What the Health Care Bill Actually Says," and it was put together by John David Lewis. It is from the website Classical Ideals. John David Lewis is a professor of classics at Duke University, and here is how he introduces his analysis: "What does the...

While the president and Congress may not welcome actual debate there has been some occurring out here in the real world. I've had several lively discussions the past few days with people who are passionate about health care reform and willing to view it as a policy discussion and not a personal attack on the coolest president in the history of EVER. I've always been a fan of letting states run most programs with a modicum of federal oversight. Once the feds are in charge, we go through the looking glass. The federal bureaucracy is a monolithic, slow moving behemoth...

Page 425 Lines 4-12 - Government mandates Advance Care Planning Consults. Think Senior Citizens end of life. Every five years, the elderly will have to attend a mandatory “advanced care planning consultation” for an “explanation by the practitioner of the continuum of end of life services.” The consultation will be conducted more frequently if a significant change in health condition; including diagnosis of a chronic, progressive, life limiting disease, terminal diagnosis, life threatening injury or upon admission to a skilled nursing or long term care facility. In other words, if you are old, you will be consulted about what your...

My father was a small town country doctor and dentist. He made house calls, He set his own hours and determined his own time off. As he got older, he limited his practice hours, and the type of dentistry he did in order to maximize proift per time worked. At the most, he made $25,000 a year -- enough to live comfortably, but not enough to completely pay his only child’s post graduate education. He considered himself a free man. I paid my way through a private Medical School by joining the Navy. After four years of college, four years...

We can criticize socialized health care, citing statistics and chronicling the historical record of runaway costs and deterioration of quality. But you have to deal directly with Medicare and Medicaid (or perhaps be a former Soviet citizen) to really appreciate the Twilight Zone nature of government-run programs. Among federal Medicare regulations -- which are over 130,000 pages long -- there is more than ample room for confusion and some humor. After a long search for traction weights (those five pound blocks of metal used to pull fractures out to length) I found them propping open doors to patient rooms in...

Planned Parenthood Fined 700K for Medicaid Overbilling on Abortion Spokane, WA (LifeNews.com) -- The Planned Parenthood abortion business in Spokane, Washington has been hit with a $700,000 fine from the state health department. The result of an audit by state officials shows it was routinely overbilling Medicaid for abortions as well as contraception and family planning services. http://www.LifeNews.com/state4336.html

There is a little known section of Medicaid that allows each individual state to place on lien on the insured's personal and real property and allows those states to force sale in order to collect on bills following the insured's death. Most people likely think that Medicaid provides insurance for those that can't provide for themselves. In some sense, that's true. On the other hand, there is a plethora of medical procedures that Medicaid doesn't provide and if a patient is subject to one of them, a lien will be slapped on their property. Some of the medical procedures that...

Okay we have now gotten into this health care debate and as we go more into the two competing bills in Congress we find more and more things that are absolutely insidious, vauge, and certainly open to any interpretation that the Government would like. Now we know health costs have been rising for any number of years. The key question is just when did health care start to get out of control? I am a baby boomer and growing up I don't really remember my father having a lot of health insurance, what he did have was rather inexpensive and...

Since its inception over four decades ago, New York State’s Medicaid program has expanded inexorably. Today it is the nation’s most expensive by far, projected to spend a mind-boggling $49.2 billion in 2010—roughly 14 percent of the nation’s total Medicaid budget, though the state holds just 7 percent of the nation’s population. The program’s enormous size has helped saddle New York taxpayers with some of the highest state and local taxes in the United States, killing jobs and siphoning support from other vital public needs. As Richard Daines, the commissioner of the state’s Department of Health, put it in early...

You Paid For It: EMS Commissioner Responds to Ambulance Ride Investigation Erie County's EMS policy, that requires it to transport patients each time a 911 call is made, could change. On Wednesday, 2 on Your Side told you about Scott Graham, who admits to using an ambulance as a glorified taxi cab service. Taxpayers pick up his "fare" each time he calls for an ambulance. "I'd say about a thousand times," Graham told 2 On Your Side about the number of times he estimates an ambulance has picked him up over the past few years. He suffers from sickle cell...

With the health-care bill faltering in Congress, the ritual weeping has begun over the death, once again, of “bipartisanship.” The belief that the answer to any problem lies with “the center” may be the greatest superstition in the ever-magical world of American politics. Mostly it is journalists and pundits who propagate the notion that crazies on the left and right have neutered the problem-solving center, the moderates, the pragmatists. In fact, the bipartisan center has been dying every year since Congress passed the Medicare and Medicaid bill of 1965. The people who back then were staffers to the politicians and...

       Let’s start out with the proposition that the government has no business paying for healthcare for anyone who is not employed by the government. We have Truman, a Democrat, to thank for a bankrupt idea. His administration passed the Medicare bill, to add more fraud and waist we now have Medicaid. For all the talk of the uninsured you’d think that at least a few people would mention that those who cannot afford health insurance already have it, and it’s called MEDICAID, remember?         “Medicaid was created in 1965 through Title XIX of the Social Security Act. Health insurance...

President Barack Obama repeatedly tells us that one reason national health care is needed is that we can no longer afford to pay for Medicare and Medicaid. But if Medicare and Medicaid are fiscally insolvent and gradually bankrupting our society, why is a government takeover of medical care for the rest of society a good idea? What large-scale government program has not eventually spiraled out of control, let alone stayed within its projected budget? Why should anyone believe that nationalizing health care would create the first major government program to “pay for itself,” let alone get smaller rather than larger...

Policy Makers say the only way to achieve social justice is to deliver an equal and adequate amount of health care, directed by a well motivated government central plan. No more crude private system, flawed, uneven, and unfair. I have a day job as a physician. A great job, a wonderful job, better because I do it in the emergency department at a very big army base, so I can thank soldiers and retired soldiers for their service. I also get to teach, and emergency medicine is a great niche for a physician suited to it. I did my internship...

The Congressional Budget Office delivered a couple of blows to President Obama's health care proposals last week. Fear of the trillion dollar costs and at least $240 billion in increased deficits are chasing away even Democrats. And that's not the worst of it. The price tag is actually much higher than reported because many of the real costs are paid for by others. The $219 billion of "savings" touted by House Democrats refers to hospital and doctors getting less for their services. This is what the government already does with Medicaid and Medicare, which on average pay 30 percent less...

Here’s a quiz. Your car won’t start because the battery is fried. Do you A) buy a new battery and continue your careless habits; B) buy a new battery and take better care of it; C) buy a new car? Only the very stupid choose C. The unwillingness to examine three causes for the high cost of health care makes a mockery of the health care overhaul debate. Let’s start with the stipulations that health CARE is not broken and that affordable health care and healthcare COVERAGE are the big bugaboos. That said, let’s look at some reasons for the...

If you think government is too big and too costly, wait until Obamacare kicks in. The Congressional Budget Office put the price tag of the House Democrats' health care takeover plans at $1.5 trillion over 10 years. But the CBO's fine print included a telltale caveat: "We have not yet estimated the administrative costs to the federal government of implementing the specified policies, nor have we accounted for all of the proposal's likely effects on spending for other federal programs." You don't need an accounting degree or clairvoyant powers. The administrative costs and spillover spending effects will be astronomical. Look...

Bandaids on Fiscal Bullet Wounds by: Mytheos Holt, July 13, 2009 In the face of legislation to create a public option in health care, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) recently convened a panel of experts to discuss the prospects of reforming the existing institution of Medicaid—a proposition which economists Thomas Granneman and Mark Pauly aim to defend in their newly released book “Reform Medicaid First: Laying the Foundation for National Health Care Reform.” The talk was moderated by Robert Helms, of the Medicaid Commission. Pauly and Granneman gave the first two speeches. In his speech, Pauly stated that the most...

This one's going to blow baby boomers' minds. It concerns a little-known law dating to Elizabethan England suddenly being enforced with gusto in Pennsylvania. The law can force adult children to pay their parents' health-care costs. If Mom and Pop can't pay, you pay. If they have the money but refuse to pay, you pay. If you don't, watch your credit rating sink under the weight of a legal judgment that will haunt you for life. It happened to Don Grant. It can happen to you. The Havertown man is nearly 50 and struggling to pay his mortgage and $100,000...

Democrats on the influential House Ways and Means Committee seemed to be moving toward a funding plan for health-care reform that would cut Medicare and Medicaid spending by roughly $500 billion to $600 billion and levy a surtax on the wealthy — even as the bill's introduction was put off as party moderates wrangled with leadership over how to proceed. Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel said Friday the plan would include three different surtax rates that would affect people making $350,000, $500,000 and $1 million a year, respectively. Rangel said the rates would be small, perhaps ranging between...

Two tours in Vietnam. A Purple Heart. A welding accident. A wheelchair. Death at 61. A bill for $277,186.96. Two months after Roger Lennon died, the woman who took care of him for more than a dozen years got a bill in the mail. The state of Iowa said the Bettendorf veteran owes almost $300,000 for the medical care he received in the state-run veterans home. "I called them and said, 'Is this a joke?'" Sarah Miller said. "Who has that kind of money? And I was with Roger every time he was signed into the Iowa Veterans Home in...

Remember last week when the media touted a new cost estimate by the Congressional Budget Office suggesting that Democrats on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee had found a magic want enabling them to cover 97 percent of the uninsured for $600 billion? Well, we now know that the cost is more like $1.1 trillion, and likely higher. As I cautioned when the CBO numbers came out last week, the $600 billion estimate did not include the price of massively expanding Medicaid, a costly provision of all of the various Democratic health care proposals. But now the CBO...