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--SNIP-- Gruber said during an event at Simmons College in February. ”Ted Kennedy had managed to figure out a way to rip off the federal Medicaid program to the tune of about $500 million a year through a series of strange manipulations. “Here was Mitt Romney’s dirty little secret that we don’t like to talk about in Massachusetts, which is the way we passed our law is the federal government paid for it. “George Bush said why am I sending this Democrat $500 million a year, I’m taking it back,” Gruber explained, adding “Mitt Romney to his credit went to...

Immigrants and their U.S.-born children make up more than 40 percent of new Medicaid recipients at a cost of $4.6 billion, according to an analysis of government data. The Center for Immigration Studies, a low-immigration advocacy group, released a report early Thursday that found both legal and illegal immigrants and their minor children made up 42 percent of Medicaid growth from 2011 to last year. Part of the increased enrollment came as a result of the new healthcare law’s expansion of Medicaid to impoverished and low-income adults. [SNIP] According to CIS officials, most of the immigrants tallied in the report...

People who weren’t even born in America are taking significant advantage of one of Obamacare’s single-most expensive benefits, the expansion of Medicaid, a new report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) shows. In fact, immigrants have accounted for 42 percent of the growth in Medicaid enrollment since Obamacare began being implemented in 2011, the report finds. “The high rate and significant growth in Medicaid associated with immigrants is mainly the result of a legal immigration system that admits large numbers of immigrants with relatively low-levels of education, many of whom end up poor and uninsured,” report co-author Steven Camarota...

The administration on Monday said fewer than 10 million Americans will enroll in Obamacare’s health exchanges this go-around, well short of the 13 million target congressional scorekeepers deemed critical to its economics, suggesting another rocky rollout in the law’s second year of full operation. Policy advisers at the Health & Human Services Department estimated that 9 million to 9.9 million people would enroll through the exchanges — or only a slight increase over the 8 million that the administration says were active at the end of the first enrollment period this April. The Congressional Budget Office, which is the government’s...

Medicaid chiefs from red and blue states are urging Congress to stem the cost of revolutionary new drugs for hepatitis C, cancer, and other diseases. In a letter Tuesday to key congressional committees, the National Association of Medicaid Directors said lawmakers should consider everything from outright price controls on manufacturers to federal help for states trying to pay for the new medications. The bipartisan group did not endorse any particular course of action. …

The federal government has sued New York City, saying it ripped off Medicaid for millions of dollars by submitting tens of thousands of false claims. […] The lawsuit says the city and a computer company used computer programs to dodge a requirement that Medicaid be billed only after private insurance coverage is exhausted. The lawsuit says false diagnosis codes were submitted to Medicaid. …

A Bristol mother is upset after she says her baby was denied a flu vaccination, even though the health department had flu shots on the shelf. When Annie Howard took her 14-month-old son to get his flu shot last week, she ran into what she calls a big problem. "My child is being denied the vaccination outright, denied the vaccination because we have insurance. That baffles me," she says. Howard's physician ran out of the preservative-free vaccination for infants, so she made an appointment at the Sullivan County Health Department. "I called asking them if they have the infant vaccination,...

As the 800-pound gorilla of retailers, Wal-Mart made national headlines when it announced on Tuesday that it was cutting the health benefits for its 30,000 employees who work fewer than 30 hours a week. A company blog post put the move down to rising healthcare costs, but the 30-hour cut-off gives a clue as to the real cause - President Barack Obama's healthcare reform. Under the Affordable Care Act, large companies are required, starting this January, to provide subsidised healthcare for every employee who works 30-hours a week or more. As the Atlantic's David A Graham notes, many of the...

Walmart announced today that as of the beginning of next year it will be dropping health insurance for 30,000 employees who work less than 30 hours per week. So why is this a good thing? It may involve some hassle for individual employees, as they’ll have to go to the exchange to figure out what plan to get. But most of those Walmart workers will likely come out ahead. Someone who’s earning $9 an hour working 30 hours a week at a Walmart would be making $13,500 a year. Depending on what their spouse makes and what state they’re in,...

Democrat Charlie Crist holds a sizable 53-29 percent lead over Gov. Rick Scott among Hispanic voters, according to a new poll that indicates this fastest growing segment of the electorate doesn’t like Republican positions on immigration, Medicaid and the minimum wage.

On November 15, open enrollment in the Obamacare exchanges begins again. Before the second act of our national healthcare drama commences, let’s review what we’ve learned in Act I. For starters, everyone now knows that federal officials are challenged when it comes to setting up a website. But they’ve demonstrated the ability to dole out a huge amount of taxpayers’ money for millions of people signing up for Medicaid, a welfare program. And they’ve proved they can send hundreds of millions of federal taxpayers’ dollars to their bureaucratic counterparts in states, like Maryland and Oregon, that can’t manage their own...

As a U.S. senator, Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., makes $174,000 a year. So imagine his surprise a few months ago, when he learned the Cover Oregon health insurance exchange had enrolled him in the Oregon Health Plan, which covers only the poorest of the poor. Chalk up another embarrassing glitch for Cover Oregon, which remains a troubled work-in-progress after months of triage and more than $300 million in taxpayer money. A few months ago, Merkley opened the mail at his east Portland home to find he’d been enrolled in the Medicaid-funded Oregon Health Plan. The Oregon Democrat already had signed up...

Have you heard about the insurance company that provides free health coverage for the poor? Me neither. What about the hospital that provides free health care services to the poor? Of course, you say. Many of them do! Indeed, some of these hospitals even go bankrupt in the process. It is beyond the scope of this article to discern how economic values are set in a society, but rest assured that supply and demand are but one factor—especially in health care. Notably, health care is the most regulated industry in the country. With compliance comes massive additional costs, not to...

A new report showing the continued pileup of unpaid medical bills in states that didn’t expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act is escalating criticism on these Republican-led areas of the country to expand the health insurance program for the poor. The report out last week from the Obama administration shows the costs of uncompensated care are projected to fall by $5.7 billion this year largely because millions of Americans are eligible for expanded Medicaid insurance for the poor under the Affordable Care Act and they are taking advantage. About half of U.S. states opted in favor of expanding Medicaid...

Obamacare, as its advocates increasingly point out, has succeeded in expanding the number of Americans with insurance. Even though this achievement came at enormous cost, still leaves millions of Americans uninsured, and dumped millions more into Medicaid, this is still one of the few “successes” that the health-care law can claim. However, health insurance and access to health care are not the same thing. And evidence is growing that Obamacare is likely to make it harder for us to see a doctor or otherwise obtain care. Of course, we already know that the limited network of physicians available through most...

<p>As heavy lobbying by the hospital industry intersects with immediate political considerations, a growing number of Republican governors are caving in to Medicaid expansion through President Obama’s healthcare law.</p> <p>In the process, they are imposing massive and unnecessary financial burdens on taxpayers.</p>

Ending a yearlong negotiation, the Obama administration on Thursday approved Gov. Corbett's alternative Medicaid expansion proposal, a step that could extend health-care benefits to roughly 600,000 uninsured Pennsylvanians. In what was described as a five-year demonstration project, Pennsylvania got the go-ahead to use federal money to pay private insurers to provide health care to uninsured individuals - many in low-wage jobs. The Obama administration praised Pennsylvania for joining other states that opted into the program under the Affordable Care Act. Corbett administration officials called the agreement a successful compromise.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit reinstated a case brought against Planned Parenthood of the Heartland in Iowa by one of its former employees who alleges the abortion giant defrauded and abused taxpayer funds. Susan Thayer, a former facility director of Planned Parenthood, filed a lawsuit in 2011 against the federally funded abortion provider, but a district court judge dismissed the case the following year, states Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which represents Thayer. According to a press release by ADF, the lawsuit claims that Planned Parenthood submitted “repeated false, fraudulent, and/or ineligible claims for reimbursements” to Medicaid...

The Affordable Care Act cannot be broken down into sound bites. This holds true for both its most ardent supporters and its most fervent opponents. The law is simply too complex to be labeled either a total failure or a smashing success. But that doesn't mean it isn't trending in one of those two directions. Across the country, individuals and families are beginning to learn whether their insurance premiums will change for 2015—early estimates indicate an overall national increase of 7.5 percent, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers analysis. That's what is expected despite the early promise that the ACA would lower...

When a federal appeals court ruled last month that a seemingly arcane wording flaw in the Affordable Care Act should invalidate a central part of the law, many of those who drafted the statute five years ago reacted with shock and anger.. In 2009, they had spent months piecing together a compromise that sought to create a national system of subsidized insurance — but one run by the states. Now, they fear their work could be undone by what some call a "drafting error" and others portray as a political miscalculation. The judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for...