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The federal Medicare health insurance program winds up paying the fare for many of the ambulance rides provided by the city of St. Paul. That's why the city in 2012 was one of the largest single recipients of Medicare payments among non-hospital health care providers in the state, according to data released this month by the federal government. Out of more than 19,000 health care providers during 2012 who cared for Medicare patients in Minnesota, the city's take of more than $2 million was the ninth largest individual sum. Whether they were providing ambulance rides or treating illnesses, the state's...

Lost in the overall shuffle concerning the many problems with Obamacare’s exchanges is the central problem of enforcement of those aspects of the law the president hasn’t waived or delayed yet – including the particular challenge when it comes to verifying the immigration status of those applying for taxpayer subsidized insurance. On April 1st, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued a new guidance document to health insurers. The CMS guidance says that people whose immigration status is uncertain will be presumed eligible for subsidized coverage in Obamacare’s marketplaces while a further review is pending. Emphasis mine: If there...

The new leftist website, Vox, has an article by Sarah Kliff on Vermont’s experiment with a single-payer healthcare system. But I don’t really have much to say about what’s happening in the Green Mountain State, other than to declare that I much prefer healthcare experiments to occur at the state level. Indeed, we should reform Medicaid and Medicare and also fix the tax code so that Washington has no role in healthcare. Then the states can experiment and compete to see what works best. But that’s a topic for another day. The real reason I cite Kliff’s article is that...

Earlier this week, the Medicare system for the first time released a list of its payments to individual doctors, showing that just a few doctors accounted for a huge fraction of Medicare payments. As Frances Robles and Eric Lipton of The Times reported on Thursday, two of those doctors had given lavishly to Democratic politicians in hopes of getting Medicare investigators off their backs. The country’s top recipient of Medicare dollars was Dr. Salomon Melgen, a Florida ophthalmologist who has been repeatedly investigated for overbilling the government for an eye medication. In 2012, he received $21 million in Medicare reimbursements....

The Florida doctor who entangled Sen. Robert Menendez in an FBI investigation also turns out to be the nation’s No. 1 recipient of Medicare funds. Dr. Salomon Melgin, the Florida eye surgeon, charged the government $320 for giving 37,075 injections of an eye-drug to 645 patients. That’s an average of 57 injections per patient, costing the taxpayer $21 million in 2012. The data was buried in an April 9 release of Medicare data by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Studies. The wealthy doctor lives in a palatial house in in North Palm Beach, and donated heavily to Menendez. He’s...

The top 1% of 825,000 individual medical providers accounted for 14% of the $77 billion in medicare billing in 2012, according to new federal data reported by the WSJ. The data shows a very small number of doctors and medical providers account for a huge amount of the costs for treating the elderly... One researcher summed it up, "There's all sorts of services that are low-value for patients, high-revenue to providers," and leaves us wondering, once again, how the government will manage as Obamacare's "success" washes ashore. A doctor who treats a degenerative eye disease in seniors was paid $21...

(Reuters) :snip: After decades of litigation and over the strenuous objections of the American Medical Association, the leading U.S. doctors group, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) on Wednesday made public for the first time how much Medicare pays individual doctors. The massive data release, totaling nearly 10 million lines, also includes which medical services each of more than 880,000 physicians and other healthcare providers nationwide billed Medicare for in 2012. :snip: Last December, the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, CMS's parent agency, found that 303 clinicians each collected more than $3...

And here I bet some of you thought the 2013 elections were over, didn’t you? Well, they were for the most part, but given the variations in election laws and special circumstances from state to state, there’s always some action brewing someplace. In this case, the congressional seat in Louisiana’s 5th district was open due to Republican Rodney Alexander’s resignation earlier this year to take a job with the Jindal administration. That required a special election, which began earlier this fall. Because of Louisiana’s somewhat unique election structure and the fact that nobody got more than 50% of the vote,...

Vance McAlliser, one of two candidates in a runoff for Congressman from Louisiana’s Fifth District, said yesterday that he supported a “path to citizenship” for aliens that are in the United States illegally. Path to Citizenship is considered by most conservatives to be a politically correct term for amnesty for illegals. From the News Star: And on immigration reform, McAllister said he would support a path to citizenship for those immigrants already here illegally. “We have to secure the borders, but (citizenship) has to be attainable for those people already here,” he said. “It has to be a tough path,...

Hours after political unknown Vance McAllister pulled off a startling upset Saturday night in the special election for Congress in Louisiana's 5th District, pundits and pols were scrambling to figure out how he did it — and whether a trend of "Mr. Outside" and "Miss Outside" defeating established politicians in Republican primaries has begun for 2014. "The election of Vance McAllister to Congress in Louisiana's 5th District reflects the appeal of being an outsider in today's poisonous political environment," Mark Kennedy, former Republican congressman from Minnesota and director of the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University, told...

Businessman Vance McAllister has won the special runoff election for a vacant northeast Louisiana congressional seat, notching an upset win over fellow Republican Neil Riser, according to the Associated Press. With 99 percent of precincts reporting, McAllister, a political newcomer, led Riser, a state senator who had won the support of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and much of the state’s GOP congressional delegation, 59.7 percent to 40.3 percent. McAllister will succeed former GOP Rep. Rodney Alexander, who resigned in August to take a job in Gov. Bobby Jindal’s administration after spending more than a decade in the House. Riser...

An unknown political novice who has never visited Washington, D.C., won a special election for Louisiana's 5th District seat Saturday on the endorsement of the “Duck Dynasty” family and a promise to fix Obamacare. Vance McAllister beat establishment candidate Neil Riser, a state senator, in Saturday's runoff election created when former Rep. Rodney Alexander resigned on Sept. 26 to become secretary of the Louisiana Department of Veterans Affairs under Republican Governor Bobby Jindal.

Hours after political unknown Vance McAllister pulled off a startling upset Saturday night in the special election for Congress in Louisiana's 5th District, pundits and pols were scrambling to figure out how he did it — and whether a trend of "Mr. Outside" and "Miss Outside" defeating established politicians in Republican primaries has begun for 2014.

Vance McAllister, a political newcomer with the backing of the popular "Duck Dynasty" TV family, was elected as Louisiana's newest member of Congress Saturday night. According to the Louisiana Secretary of State's website, McAllister led establishment candidate Neil Riser 59.7 percent to 40.3 percent -- a difference of over 17,500 votes -- with 976 of a possible 981 precincts reporting. McAllister advanced to this weekend’s election to face off against Riser after an October contest with more than a dozen other candidates from both political parties -- in what is known as a “jungle primary.” The seat in Louisiana's 5th...

A political candidate endorsed by a member of the "Duck Dynasty" family has upset his establishment opponent in a special election held in Louisiana. Vance McAllister, a businessman who received an endorsement from Willie Robertson not long before the vote, was victorious against La. State Senator Neil Riser this past weekend. In the special runoff election held for the vacated Fifth Congressional District seat of Louisiana, McAllister defeated Riser with 59.7 percent of the vote versus Riser's 40.3 percent, reported Politico. Riser had strong support from Republican establishment figures at the state and federal level and was expected to win...

Vance McAllister, a political newcomer with the backing of the popular "Duck Dynasty" TV family, is Louisiana's newest member of Congress. McAllister, who largely self-funded his campaign, beat establishment candidate Neil Riser, a state senator, in Saturday's runoff election for the vacant 5th District seat. Both men are Republicans.

obody -- and I mean nobody -- should be surprised by this: Amid heavy pressure from insurers, lawmaker and advocates, the Obama administration has backed off proposed cuts to Medicare Advantage for the second year in a row. They’ll rise by 0.4 percent in 2015 instead of undergoing the originally proposed 1.9 percent cut....“The changes CMS included in the final rate notice will help mitigate the impact on seniors, but the Medicare Advantage program is still facing a reduction in payment rates next year on top of the 6 percent cut to payments in 2014,” said [AHIP] president Karen Ignagni....

It is a fool’s errand to attempt a cost-benefit analysis on government programs. War, for example, is probably the oldest government program. It is easy enough to determine the cost in lives and treasure, but it is far more difficult to determine the benefits, and then, if these benefits were worth the cost. Back in the day, victory was the goal, and presumably the overriding benefit. In the past, “victory” was always understood as causing your enemy to surrender. Nowadays, of course, that is no longer the case. In the 1960s, it became popular to declare “war” on all sorts...

The Obama administration on Monday canceled planned cuts to Medicare Advantage amid a drumbeat of election-year opposition from Democrats. The cuts would have reduced the benefits that seniors receive from insurance plans in the program, which offers an alternative to traditional Medicare. The reversal came as a relief to many Democrats, who feared the cuts would create a backlash among seniors in the midterm elections. “In many parts of the country, including New York, Medicare Advantage works very well. They’ve shouldered their share already and this proposed cut would have been disproportionate, hurting seniors who would lose doctors or pay...

Democrats are facing a senior problem that could get even worse this year. The party has traditionally had trouble with older voters, losing the group aged 65 and over by 21 points in 2010 — when Republicans picked up 63 seats — and by 12 points in the 2012 presidential race. Seniors are the GOP’s most reliable voting bloc in midterm years, turning out in higher numbers than Democratic base voters. A recent Gallup poll showed seniors have become even more Republican over the last two decades; in 2013, 48 percent considered themselves Republican. That spells trouble for Democrats, who...