Free Republic

Why thieves love America’s health-care system! INVESTIGATORS in New York were looking for health-care fraud hot-spots. Agents suggested Oceana, a cluster of luxury condos in Brighton Beach. The 865-unit complex had a garage full of Porsches and Aston Martins—and 500 residents claiming Medicaid, which is meant for the poor and disabled. Though many claims had been filed legitimately, some looked iffy. Last August six residents were charged. Within weeks another 150 had stopped claiming assistance, says Robert Byrnes, one of the investigators. Health care is a tempting target for thieves. Medicaid doles out $415 billion a year; Medicare (a federal...

There was an article in the Summer 2017 issue of "Good Medicine" that suggested removing SNAP ("food stamp" replacement) program eligibility for sweetened beverages, desserts, red meat, cheese, salty snacks, candy and sugar for health reasons. I support such SNAP eligibility removals, except for red meat or cheese. I'm not so sure that red meat or cheese should be removed from SNAP eligibility since so much of American agricultural land is only suitable for raising red meat/dairy product animals. That issue in "Good Medicine" also reported on the MIND diet to reduce Alzheimer's risk. The MIND diet was also reported...

Oregon has determined it awarded Medicaid health benefits to more than 37,000 people during the past year who earned too much money or otherwise failed to qualify, new figures show. That high number represents nearly half the Medicaid recipients whose incomes the state rechecked this spring and summer. It has come to light as the state health authority works through a backlog of eligibility checks caused by technology problems and the spike in enrollment under the Affordable Care Act. The count surpasses predictions to the Legislature by agency director Lynne Saxton, who pegged the number at 32,000. And it almost...

The hustle is on to insure Chicagoans Community groups are scrambling to figure out how to connect Chicagoans with health insurance in the wake of the Trump administration no longer funding outreach efforts in 18 cities, including Chicago. The federal money was used to help enroll people into plans sold on the Obamacare public health insurance exchanges, and to usher the uninsured into the expanded Medicaid program in Illinois. Combined with consumer confusion over

PARASITES IN US HEALTH CARE In early May my wife and I returned from a short vacation in Peru. Two weeks later I came down with severe diarrhea that has now continued unabated for six weeks. The cause has been identified as a parasite—Blastasytis Species. This parasite is believed to be present in 23% of the American population and 100% of people in “less developed countries” (Wikipedia). Albendazole is the first line of treatment for this infection. Albendazole tablets are sold throughout the world (outside of the US) for 1 penny to six cents each and are usually available as...

The charges started racking up the moment Annette Johnson arrived at Mount Sinai Hospital with a gunshot wound to her left forearm. Doctors sliced open Johnson's arm and installed a $500 metal plate to shore up her shattered ulna, securing it with numerous bone screws that cost $246 apiece. There were morphine drips to quell pain, tetanus shots to prevent infection, blood screens and anesthesia. Two years earlier in a different part of the city, Leo Leyva arrived at a North Side hospital with a gunshot wound to his back. His last memory before going under anesthesia was a nurse...

Dismantling Medicaid is at the heart of President Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress’ agenda. President Trump proposed cutting Medicaid by half in his budget, and Congress has proposed taking an ax to the program both through their repeal of the Affordable Care Act as well as through their budget blueprints. In all cases, these cuts to health coverage and services for children, people with disabilities, seniors, and low-income adults whom Medicaid serves would be used to pay for tax cuts for millionaires and corporations. These cuts would have devastating consequences for the individuals, families, and communities that Medicaid serves....

In a bold move to revive their healthcare bill, Senate Republican leaders are getting ready to propose giving $200 billion in assistance to states that expanded Medicaid, according to a person familiar with internal Senate negotiations. The huge sum would be funded by leaving in place ObamaCare’s net investment income tax and its Medicare surtax on wealthy earners, according to the source briefed on the proposal. The figure is likely to outrage conservatives, who would prefer to use the savings from the Senate healthcare bill to pay down the deficit.

More than 400 people have been charged with taking part in health care fraud and opioid scams that totaled $1.3 billion in false billing, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Thursday. Sessions called the collective action the "largest health care fraud takedown operation in American history" and said it indicates that some doctors, nurses and pharmacists "have chosen to violate their oaths and put greed ahead of their patients."

California is harming medical care for more than 13 million lower-income residents, more than half of them Latinos, by failing to pay doctors enough to provide proper care, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday. The lawsuit alleges the state violates Latinos’ civil rights because poorly paid health care providers balk at providing treatment. It alleges the low reimbursements often mean that those who rely on Medi-Cal, the state’s health care program for the poor, are denied timely and quality medical care. The lawsuit was filed in Alameda County Superior Court by plaintiffs including the state’s largest labor union representing health...

Archimedes, one of the greatest mathematicians and scientists of all time understood the importance of the design of a system. Commenting on the incredible power of levers he noted, “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth.” With a properly designed system almost anything is possible; with a poor one, almost nothing.

If you want a quick guide to what is wrong with the debate over repealing and replacing Obamacare, just look to the ongoing fight over Medicaid. Democrats have dug in over any change to the current program, solemnly declaring that changing so much as a comma or semicolon in the ACA’s expansion of the program would immediately sentence millions of children to death. Meanwhile, Republicans, having been thoroughly cowed, are debating how best to pretend that they reformed Medicaid without actually reforming it. Not exactly inspiring. Still, in a debate almost completely dominated by politics and public relations rather...

People will die from this policy! We hear this charge thrown around in political debates that it has become cliché to the point of irony, but does it have any basis in reality for health-care policy? Former Medicare and Social Security trustee Charles Blahous offers his reasoned and measured analysis of the claim — and rejects it entirely. Blahous calls it “spurious,� based on a logical fallacy related to the fallacy of composition: These sensational claims rest on fallacious reasoning, which I’ll describe later in this piece. But first let’s acknowledge that neither I, you, nor anyone else has...

Former President Barack Obama is joining the demagogic slugfest against the GOP’s latest bill to repeal and replace ObamaCare. He claims the GOP bill would “ruin Medicaid.” He’s wrong. His health law ruined Medicaid. Now, half of all women who give birth in the United States are on Medicaid, a staggering figure. The Republican bill, awaiting Senate action, will reform Medicaid, restoring its original mission and ensuring its future. Medicaid was created in 1965 as a safety net for the poor. But ObamaCare distorted it, edging the US health-care system closer to a Medicaid-for-all or single-payer system. Swelling the Medicaid...

As of April, there were 74,531,002 people enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program as of April, according to the latest data released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. That is up 16,705,235 in the 49 states that reported their Medicaid/CHIP enrollment numbers for both the July-to-September period of 2013 (the last quarter before the Obamacare exchanges opened) and this April. The 74,531,002 enrolled in Medicaid/CHIP as of April includes the numbers for all 50 states and the District of Columbia. In the 49 states that reported both before the Obamacare exchanges opened in 2013 and...

As for Medicaid, about two-thirds of enrollees nationwide are in privately managed plans and the states have turned to private contracting for the same reasons we did in Medicare: the private plans are cheaper and better. So on the evidence, it would appear that conservative Republicans don’t have much to lose by allowing a public option and they may have something to gain – allowing those currently enrolled in public programs to leave and enroll in better private sector alternatives. Here’s the catch. The competition must be on a level playing field. That means we can’t have private plans exposed...

In Nevada, we will know the difference between a moderate Republican and a Socialist by Friday Free enterprise has done more to reduce poverty than all the government programs dreamed up by Democrats.—Ronald Reagan In a recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 24 states have a majority of births financed by Medicaid. In other words, a majority of births in nearly half of our nation are born into poverty. This is progress according to Progressives Socialists, the champions of big government (not the little guy) and the architects of the disaster known as Obamacare. So why would Socialists double...

Stimulus program to incentivize using electronic health records 'vulnerable to abuse' An Obama administration program to encourage the use of electronic health records made over $729 million in erroneous payments, according to a new audit. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services also paid dead doctors for enrolling in its program, the audit, released by the agency's inspector general Monday, revealed. "From May 2011 through June 2014, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services paid an estimated $729 million in Medicare electronic health record incentive payments to eligible professionals who did not comply with Federal requirements," the inspector general said....

Last week, President Trump proposed massive spending increases for Medicaid. Of course, most of the media didn't report it that way. They reported that the president's proposal "slashes spending." That he wants to cut "at least $610 billion" from Medicaid. That "Trump's Budget Cuts Deeply Into Medicaid." And so on. That might be vaguely true in the Washington sense. It's not at all true in the real-world sense. Here's the difference. If you look at the actual White House budget proposal, you'll note that it includes tables for "baseline" spending and "proposed" spending. Baseline spending is spending that would occur...

The success of any reform of U.S. health care will stand or fall with the provisions made for Medicaid. It has the most beneficiaries of any U.S health program, takes a sizable and increasing portion of federal and state budgets, and serves the most vulnerable among us—the indigent and the disabled. A few numbers give an idea of the size and cost of this giant program. Medicaid’s enrollment, at 71.6 million, is larger than the population of France and includes about 22 percent of the U.S. population. Combined federal and state spending on Medicaid in fiscal 2016 was $574.2 billion.