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The Congressional Budget office latest update on the demise of Social Security.

An investigation into what the authorities say was a scheme that used homeless people to bilk tens of millions of dollars from federal and state health insurance programs began four years ago with a tip from a rescue mission employee. The employee, Scott Johnson, who works for the Union Rescue Mission in the heart of Skid Row, said he had noticed vans and cars loading up homeless people. “Sometimes they were so full of people that they put people in the trunks of cars,” Mr. Johnson said Thursday as he passed out bottles of water to the homeless. “I wondered...

Entitlements: The day of reckoning is coming for the costs we're running up to keep Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits flowing. Judgment will be painful — as in a 150% increase in our current tax bills.In an analysis prepared for Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, the Congressional Budget Office outlined the ghastly details: "The tax rate for the lowest tax bracket," the CBO told Ryan, "would have to be increased from 10% to 25% (or 150%), the tax rate on incomes in the current 25% bracket would have to be increased to 63% (or 152%); and the tax rate of...

Peter Orszag is no conservative ideologue. The head of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) was a scholar at the liberal Brookings Institution before being picked for his current position by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Yet, Mr. Orszag recently warned that the rising cost of federal entitlement programs, particularly Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, poses a grave threat to America's economic future. According to Mr. Orszag, without dramatic reform, the cost of those three programs alone will rise from 18 percent of GDP today to 28 percent by the middle of this century and as much as 35 percent soon...

Rebecca Swanson, who owned and operated a drug and alcohol counseling service in Dallas, Texas, pled guilty in federal court to health care fraud and aiding and abetting in connection with defrauding Medicaid out of more than $373,000.counseling services rendered.

Gov. Rod Blagojevich used his amendatory veto power Monday to rewrite a House bill that would require medical costs associated with autism to be covered by insurance. About 26,000 children in Illinois have been diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder and families often cover treatment costs using personal funds, according to a governor's office news release. Blagojevich and other supporters instead want insurance companies to cover up to $36,000 a year for diagnosis and treatment of autism, including speech therapy and psychiatric services, as well as doctor visits until a patient reaches 21. “Since most insurance companies do not cover the...

A disabled foster child whose liver is failing has been removed from a Central Florida hospital's organ-transplant waiting list because hospital administrators fear the state's shaky child-welfare system cannot ensure he has a permanent home in which to recover. Shands Hospital in Gainesville removed the boy, 15, from a waiting list for organ recipients after administrators determined the boy's unstable living conditions make him a poor candidate for a transplant, said Nick Cox, the Department of Children & Families regional administrator in the Tampa Bay area, where the boy lives. The state's next move: appeal to Miami's Jackson Memorial Hospital,...

Plummeting Reimbursement Rates Have Some Doctors Looking for a Way Out By AUDREY GRAYSON ABC News Medical Unit RSS For the past four years, Dr. Heather Tipsword has owned a family practice clinic that primarily treats Medicaid and Medicare patients in Oklahoma City. As many of her friends and family were looking forward to Fourth of July celebrations this past weekend, Tipsword was anxiously looking forward to another event altogether: Congress' meeting on the Monday after the holiday weekend to discuss some kind of fix to the scheduled 10.6 percent Medicare reimbursement cut. For many doctors, low Medicare and Medicaid...

We constantly hear about the cost of earmarks and the Iraq War, but we hear nothing about "entitlements" -- the government's ironic term for programs that transfer money from people who earned it to people who didn't. Today's big problem with entitlements is that their growth will soon eat everything in the federal budget, says 20/20 host John Stossel. Last month, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analyzed the growth of government spending and deficits for Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), ranking member of the House Budget Committee. According to the CBO report: Spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, which in...

Congress is spending us into a hole. We hear about the cost of earmarks and the Iraq war. But what about "entitlements"? That's the government's ironic term for programs that transfer money from people who earned it to people who didn't. Entitlement? How can you be entitled to someone else's money? To finance "entitlement" programs, the government threatens force against the taxpayers who provide the money. Why are people who favor compulsion called humanitarians, while those who favor freedom are stigmatized as greedy? But I digress. Today's big problem with entitlements is that their growth will soon eat everything in...

...Now it turns out that states have been goosing their financing arrangements to maximize their federal payouts and dump more of their costs onto taxpayers nationwide. The swindle works like this: A state overpays state-run health-care providers, such as county hospitals or nursing homes, for Medicaid benefits far in excess of its typical rates. Then the federal government reimburses the state for "half" of the inflated bills. Once the state bags the extra matching funds, the hospital is required to rebate the extra money it received at the scam's outset. Cash thus makes a round trip from states to providers...

Every politician moans that entitlement spending is out of control, so it ought to be easy at least to stop blatant fraud and abuse. Evidently not: Congress is currently resisting an attempt to rein in even a Big Con that everyone acknowledges. The scene of this crime is Medicaid, the open-ended program that provides health coverage for about 59 million low-income people, with the rolls expanding every year. States determine eligibility and what services to cover, and the feds pick up at least half the tab, though the effective "matching rate" is as high as 83%. Now it turns out...

It’s long been known that family break-up inflicts massive social costs on communities and children. But what about the burden it imposes on the American taxpayer? It’s a proven fact that family dissolution places children at greater risk of poverty, mental and physical illness, juvenile delinquency, abuse, substance abuse, and educational failure. A few years ago Wade Horn, former director of the federal Administration for Children and Families, revealed, “My agency spends $46 billion per year operating 65 different social programs. If one goes down the list of these programs… the need for each is either created or exacerbated...

MEDINA NY: Doctor’s office searched Hassan Medical targeted by State Attorney General’s office By NICOLE COLEMAN Investigators with the New York State Attorney General’s Office raided a Gwinn Street family physician’s office during patient visiting hours Friday. Wearing official jackets and golden badges, they arrived in multiple SUV trucks at Hassan Medical Group PLLC, 1038 Gwinn St., Medina sometime Friday morning. At least five State Attorney General officials remained at the office throughout the day probing the employees with questions and apparently looking through records. None were able to confirm the reason for their presence or whether they were sent...

Medicare and Medicaid cost $627 billion last year - almost a quarter of all federal spending. That amount is expected to double within 10 years as baby boomers overwhelm the Medicare program. Yet you won't hear much on this subject from Sens. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain. They fear discussing it because all the conventional choices for reining in the cost of these programs are unpleasant. They include limiting care, raising taxes, reducing payments to providers and asking wealthier beneficiaries to pay more. The Congressional Budget Office attributes much of the rise in costs to beneficial but expensive...

Columbia (WLTX)- There's nothing stronger than the bond shared between a mother and daughter. It's quite apparent in the Brown home. The kind of love Selena Brown and her daughter Arielle will need to face the tough road ahead. "I honestly want to think that nothing will happen," says Arielle Moye. But the 19 year old high school honors student can't help but wonder about her future. But you have to go back to her past. Christmas Eve 1996, to understand why. "When I finally got really sick, I was like okay, this may take a while," says Moye. Doctors...

Conservatives may be surprised to hear that for over 50 years they have been successful in stopping the growth of big government. Going all the way to the early 1950s Federal spending has hovered in a fairly narrow band around 20% of GDP. But even that limited success is soon to be swamped by reality. For the Federal Government’s long-term projections show a radical change over the next 40 years, with Federal spending soaring close to 40% of GDP or more. This is due to our nation’s big entitlement programs – Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. Counting state and local...

The US is at risk of losing its top-notch triple-A credit rating within a decade unless it takes radical action to curb soaring healthcare and social security spending, Moody's, the credit rating agency, said yesterday. The warning over the future of the triple-A rating - granted to US government debt since it was first assessed in 1917 - reflects growing concerns over the country's ability to retain its financial and economic supremacy. It could also put further pressure on candidates from both the Republican and Democratic parties to sharpen their focus on healthcare and pensions in the run-up to November's...

As of Monday, annual checkups for the nearly half a million Massachusetts children on Medicaid will carry a new requirement: Doctors must offer simple questionnaires to detect warning signs of possible mental health problems, from autism in toddlers to depression in teens. The checklists vary by age but ask questions about children's behavior - whether they are spending more time alone, seeming to have less fun, having trouble sleeping - that are designed to trigger discussion between parents and doctors. The conversations may or may not lead to a referral to a specialist

"Tony McDonald, a member of the University of Texas Young Conservatives, sets up a protest anti- American Civil Liberties Union nativity scene, dubbed a 'solstice barn,' on the university's campus in Austin December 4, 2006. The display features a 'Nancy Pelosi' angel, a 'suicide bomber' shepherd, and Marx, Lenin and Stalin as the Three Wise Men." "Josh Perry, a member of the University of Texas Young Conservatives, spreads hay as he sets up a protest anti-American Civil Liberties Union nativity scene, dubbed a 'solstice barn,' on the university's campus in Austin, Texas December 4, 2006. The display features a...

For the past two years, analysts have been asking how fast-growing WellCare Health Plans of Tampa has been able to make so much money running government health plans for the poor and elderly. Now government investigators may be asking the same thing. On a rainy Wednesday morning, more than 200 federal and state agents swarmed WellCare's campus on Henderson Road in Tampa, forcing employees onto the sidewalk and into their cars. Steven Meitzen, 51, who arrived at WellCare about 9:40 a.m. for a job interview, said he was initially told it was a bomb scare. "Later on, I talked to...

I could use some advice here. My wife hasn't been paid her salary for three weeks at the clinic she works at as an X-Ray technician. The reason is there is an investigation in South Florida of Medicare fraud by several clinics. But guess what? The bureaucrats have thrown the baby out with the bathwater and now MANY clinics down here have been cut off from Medicare payments despite no evidence of fraud on the part of those clinics. One of the clinics being unfairly penalized is the clinic where my wife works at. As a result, no Medicare payments...

Here's your chance to make a cameo appearance in Fred's Presidential campaign. Make a video telling us why you support Fred Thompson for President and upload it using the form below. We'll share these videos with all of our supporters on Fred08.com, and allow you, and them, to pick the best one. Here's your chance to be a star. Submit your video now. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sure, Fred Thompson is an accomplished lawyer, prosecuting criminals in Tennessee before serving as counsel on the Watergate hearings. And yes, he served the people of Tennessee as a common sense, conservative Senator for eight years....

State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo seems to be proving the worst fears about Medicaid fraud all-too-true: For prosecutors, it's a target-rich environment. And Cuomo has just started to scratch the surface. His latest announcement came Thursday: Some 18 home-health-care workers and a patient were arrested on charges of defrauding the state through improper billing and no-show jobs. The collars are the result of the AG's broad probe of the home-health-care industry - Operation Home Alone. And such abuse accounts for what, Cuomo says, amounts to tens of millions of dollars in Medicaid fraud. This certainly sounds promising. After all, the...

Drugging Our Poor by: Bethany Stotts, October 22, 2007 Many public schools have begun incorporating mental health screening tests into their curriculum, and may soon be analyzing family circumstances as a factor influencing low school performance under the No Child Left Behind requirements (NCLB). The proposed We Care Act (H.R. 3762) would amend the NCLB Act to stipulate that “Each State plan shall include an assessment of the nonacademic factors influencing student achievement, a description of public and private organizations and agencies within the State that are working to impact... including but not limited to state departments....and nonprofit youth development...

Nicole Garrett is not one of the uninsured. Her family is covered by Michigan’s Medicaid program. And so when her daughter Jada developed painful joint inflammation and needed to see a specialist, she turned to her Medicaid plan. But if she had coverage, she lacked access: there was only one rheumatologist in her network, and the wait to see him was more than three months. Unfortunately, her story is all too common, an example of the failure of public programs — designed with the best of intentions —to produce acceptable outcomes. With Congress debating a massive expansion of such programs,...

In an Associated Press interview, Rudy Giuliani refused to rule out raising taxes to save Social Security. As the AP quotes Giuliani: I am opposed to tax increases, but I would look at whatever proposal [a bipartisan panel] came up with and try to figure out how we can come up with a bipartisan way to do it. ... The reality is, I'm more concerned about Medicare and Medicaid than I am with Social Security, because I'm pretty sure we can solve Social Security. Putting aside for the moment the fact that either raising taxes or cutting benefits makes Social...

...SCHIP is senseless. Like its much larger sibling, Medicaid, the program forces taxpayers to send their money to Washington so that Congress can send it back to state governments with strings attached. Both programs force taxpayers to subsidize people who don't need help, discourage low-income families from climbing the economic ladder- and make private insurance more expensive for everyone else. SCHIP casts a much wider net than suggested by its stated purpose- namely, providing coverage to children in families that earn too much to qualify for Medicaid.... According to a study in the journal Inquiry, 60 percent of children eligible...

The federal government has told New York State health officials that chemotherapy, which had been covered for illegal immigrants under a government-financed program for emergency medical care, does not qualify for coverage. The decision sets the stage for a battle between the state and federal governments over how medical emergencies are defined. The change comes amid a fierce national debate on providing medical care to immigrants, with New York State officials and critics saying this latest move is one more indication of the Bush administration’s efforts to exclude the uninsured from public health services. State officials in New York and...

WASHINGTON - President Bush again called Democrats "irresponsible" on Saturday for pushing an expansion he opposes to a children's health insurance program. "Democrats in Congress have decided to pass a bill they know will be vetoed," Bush said of the measure that draws significant bipartisan support, repeating in his weekly radio address an accusation he made earlier in the week. "Members of Congress are risking health coverage for poor children purely to make a political point." At issue is the Children's Health Insurance Program, a state-federal program that subsidizes health coverage for low-income people, mostly children, in families that earn...

Operations such as Denver Harbor Clinic helping Hispanics Raquel Rangel, 30, has five children, no job and no health insurance. But with the help of a community health clinic in her Denver Harbor neighborhood, she hopes to enroll in Medicaid. For now, she can't even afford the modest co-pay the clinic collects to defray costs of treating clients without insurance. ''I don't have the money, but they are trying to help me find out if my Medicaid is being processed," said Rangel, a native Houstonian who brought two of her children with fevers to the clinic. ''Instead of turning me...

As Fred D. Thompson moves around the country delivering his folksy stump speech, he routinely makes his way through a laundry list of top concerns: national security, immigration reform, federalism and activist judges, among others. But he seems most energized when he discusses the ballooning cost of entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, and what he calls a need for more fiscal responsibility and less government in Washington. It is a recurring campaign theme of his. Mr. Thompson, a former Republican senator from Tennessee, made his greatest plea for the presidency, for instance, at the end of such remarks...

Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine informed President Bush this week that New Jersey will not obey federal rules that would make it harder to register middle-income kids for a popular government-subsidized health insurance program. His move escalated the growing confrontation between a number of states and the administration over the new rules imposed on the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). They have been criticized as unfair and overreaching by children's advocates and politicians of both parties, but Corzine's declaration marks the first time a governor has openly vowed to defy them. New Jersey's action comes against the background of a...

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration issued proposed rules Friday to trim Medicaid payments to schools. Medicaid is the federal-state health insurance program for poor people. Schools are currently billing Medicaid for administrative and overhead costs that aren't related to delivering health services to poor people, said Dennis Smith, director for the Center for Medicaid and State Operations. He said examples have included costs associated with school construction projects and transporting poor students to school. "They are essentially administrative costs of the education system and should not be billed to the Medicaid program," Smith said. He said schools would still get...

New York State will sue the Bush administration unless the federal government grants the state a waiver to extend public health coverage to tens of thousands of more children who are not covered by Medicaid, Governor Spitzer said yesterday. A lawsuit would be a last resort for the Spitzer administration, which is angling for Congress to step in and override newly imposed federal guidelines that have derailed the governor's effort to expand the state's health coverage program for children. Lawmakers are expected to pass a reauthorization of the State Children's Health Insurance Program when they return from their summer recess...

Senate Finance Committee members on Tuesday announced that they have reached a tentative agreement on legislation that would reauthorize and expand SCHIP, although the deal "is smaller than Democrats had hoped and reliant on a politically difficult" 61-cent-per-pack federal cigarette tax increase, CQ Today reports. The program is set to expire on Sept. 30. Under the bipartisan agreement, the tobacco tax increase would provide $35 billion over five years to expand SCHIP, according to committee members Gordon Smith (R-Ore.), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) (Wayne, CQ Today, 7/10). Democrats originally proposed providing an additional $50 billion over five...

Just as feared, a hateful effort to prevent illegal immigrants from getting health care through Medicaid has taken its greatest toll instead on Americans. Hundreds of thousands of needy people, many of them children, are believed to have been denied Medicaid coverage or dumped from the Medicaid rolls over the past year because they can't produce the documents now required to prove eligibility, according to The Sun's Gady A. Epstein. Congress, with the most virulent anti-illegal-immigrant lawmakers no longer in control, should move quickly to repeal this outrage. It was a poorly crafted solution to a problem more fantasy than...

Civil rights attorneys are on a national crusade to force Medicaid to pay for abortions when the mother's health is in jeopardy. Monday, they took that years-long fight to the Georgia Supreme Court. Currently, Georgia women who have abortions must foot the bill unless their life is in danger. So doctors at health clinics across Georgia are seeing poor women who can't afford abortions risk their own health by continuing dangerous pregnancies, argued New York-based attorney Louise Melling, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Reproductive Freedom Project. The ACLU filed a lawsuit in Fulton County in 2003 on behalf...

Oklahoma City, OK (LifeNews.com) -- Gov. Brad Henry has allowed a bill to become law that would get the state government out of the abortion business. The measure would prohibit abortions at state-funded medical facilities and Henry decided not to veto it after having rejected a previous measure the legislature approved. After the veto, state lawmakers reworked the bill to add rape and incest exceptions to it to meet Henry's ban.They left alone provisions that prohibit Medicaid-funded employees or facilities from promoting abortions because they are funded with state taxpayer dollars. In a press release the governor's office sent out,...

Heard Rush talking about this today.

For the first time as a presidential candidate, Sen. Barack Obama, posed a question about entitlement reform, said that "everything was on the table," except for private accounts, and in doing so, because the first top-tier Democratic presidential candidate to acknowledge that Social Security deficits could not, and would not, be solved without pain. STEPHANOPOULOS: You've also said that with Social Security, everything should be on the table. OBAMA: Yes. STEPHANOPOULOS: Raising the retirement age? OBAMA: Everything should be on the table. STEPHANOPOULOS: Raising payroll taxes? OBAMA: Everything should be on the table. I think we should approach it the...

ABC News apparently sees its role not merely as reporting the news, but acting as advocates on a highly-charged political issue being promoted by a left-wing Democratic presidential candidate. Check out the graphic from this morning's Good Morning America: "GMA Gets It Done: Taking on Medicaid. Fighting to Treat Tooth Decay." The screencap shows a palpably emotional GMA co-host Chris Cuomo literally pointing his finger at the head of the federal Medicaid program. The moment came during the course of a segment this morning recounting the sad case of 12-year old Deamonte Driver, who died after infection from an abcessed...

With grim humor, some doctors in New York call them “frequent fliers” — addicts who check into hospital detoxification units so often that dozens of them spend more than 100 nights a year in those wards. Through its Medicaid program, New York spends far more than other states on drug and alcohol treatment, including more than $300 million a year paid to hospitals for more than 30,000 detox patients. One reason for the high cost is that $50 million is spent just on the 500 most expensive patients, at a cost of about $100,000 a person. These patients check in...

The program created by Wisconsin five years ago to help low-income seniors get prescription drugs serves 104,000 people and, state officials say, has saved the federal government $669 million in Medicaid costs. That is why Gov. Jim Doyle (D) and seniors advocates were more than disappointed last week when the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services decided to pull the plug on federal funding for SeniorCare after June 30. "The Bush administration is making a terrible mistake," Doyle said in a statement after learning of the decision from acting CMS Administrator Leslie V. Norwalk. "As a result, Wisconsin seniors will...

The correct title for this article is, "Trends In Emergency Medicaid Expenditures For Recent And Undocumented Immigrants." The population is comprised of "undocumented' and legal immigrants (less than 5 years) living in North Carolina for the years 2001-2004. This population can receive Medicaid reimbursement only for "emergency" services. The data is for Medicaid reimbursement and does not include those medical services provided through other sources--primarily hospital emergency rooms and other care centers who do not attempt to collect from Medicaid. About 48 thousand individuals received care under emergency Medicaid services. 99% of the population was "undocumented" and 93% were Hispanic....

Medicaid lawsuit could cost state billions Legislators want to delay decisions till case ruling By Jason Embry and Corrie MacLaggan AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF Wednesday, March 07, 2007 A pending lawsuit expected to cost the state millions — perhaps billions — of dollars threatens to prevent lawmakers from spending more on a range of services, the Senate's chief budget-writer said Tuesday. The uncertainty could slow, or halt, efforts to increase spending on the Children's Health Insurance Program, college financial aid, pre-kindergarten and other programs. "What the Legislature probably needs to do is to hold back some money and avoid expanding any discretionary...

Medicaid is the federal-state partnership that provides health coverage for about 55 million poor people. The federal government will spend more than $200 billion on it this year, while states will spend about $150 billion... Medicare is expected to grow 6.5 percent annually during the next five years, while Medicaid will grow at a 7.3 percent clip. The regulations would barely dent those growth rates... Medicaid officials say it's unfair that some states generate extra federal funding without putting up more of their own money. The states make large payments to county-owned hospitals and nursing homes, even as counties are...

It’s really a placebo, but you wouldn’t know it from union screaming.Governor Eliot Spitzer lost a big battle with the state legislature this week, when Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno defied an agreement with him to choose a new state comptroller from a short list of qualified candidates rather than from the political trenches. But the new governor faces an even bigger struggle in the months ahead, with union interests and likely with legislative leaders too, as he tries to bring a semblance of rationality to the state’s dysfunctional health-care system—including its $45 billion Medicaid...

Have you ever notice the pleasure children receive when delving into one of the numerous “Where’s Waldo” books? Though attempts to find Waldo are good-hearted fun, taxpayer’s attempt to find leadership in the midst of hundreds of millions of dollars of state legal violations is a more troubling endeavor. When it comes to Governor Gregoire and the state’s seemingly perpetual Medicaid audit problems, the search for executive leadership evokes the frustrating question, “Where’s Gregoire?” Consider the fact that once again the state auditor has identified multiple problems with the state’s Medicaid program, yet to date, the governor has been silent...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 1 — President Bush will ask Congress in his budget next week to squeeze more than $70 billion of savings from Medicare and Medicaid over the next five years, administration officials and health care lobbyists said Thursday. The proposals, part of a White House plan to balance the budget by 2012, set the stage for a battle with Congress over entitlement spending. Even some administration officials say they cannot imagine approval of such large cutbacks in a Congress now controlled by Democrats. Mr. Bush is also expected to propose changes in the Children’s Health Insurance Program to sharpen...