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The Department of Health and Human Services is raiding several of its accounts, including money for Medicare, the Ryan White AIDS/HIV program and those for cancer and flu research to cover a shortfall in housing illegal youths pouring over the border at a rate of 255 a day. HHS is trying to come up with $167 million to fund the Office of Refugee Resettlement that is accepting the youths, according to the Center for Immigration Studies. Policy Director Jessica Vaughan said that insiders have told her that the funding crisis has forced the department to squeeze programs for money. She...

Republicans in Congress pledge to use the first opportunity of the Donald Trump presidency to repeal ObamaCare. Trump has met that pledge by appointing people most likely to dismantle it from the inside. First Trump appointed staunch ObamaCare opponent Rep. Tom Price to head HHS, and now he’s picked a health-industry expert to run the agency responsible for its Medicaid expansion. Seema Verma has plenty of experience in working the margins of ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion to push back against it: President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday morning picked the founder and CEO of a health policy consulting firm, Seema Verma,...

As a congressman, Georgia Republican Tom Price has been thwarted in his hopes to repeal the Affordable Care Act and transform Medicare into a voucher-like program for future participants. Now, as President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to run the Department of Health and Human Services, Price will wield great power as Trump’s top health policy adviser and preside, Republicans hope, over the dismantlement of President Barack Obama’s signature health care law. Price, 62, carries himself with a surgeon’s confidence and possesses deep knowledge of health policy. He is one of very few Republicans to actually propose a replacement for Obamacare, and...

WASHINGTON — Donald J. Trump once declared that campaigning for “substantial” changes to Medicare would be a political death wish. But with Election Day behind them, emboldened House Republicans say they will move forward on a years-old effort to shift Medicare away from its open-ended commitment to pay for medical services and toward a fixed government contribution for each beneficiary. The idea rarely came up during Mr. Trump’s march toward the White House, but a battle over the future of Medicare could roil Washington during his first year in office, whether he wants it or not.

<p>Theranos, the biotech company started by a 19-year-old Stanford dropout, has another hurdle to cross in its whole "we're totally a legit blood-testing company" campaign. This time, it turns out that tens of thousands of blood tests were voided, making them totally invalid. Whoops!</p>

We haven't really written much about the insane Theranos scandal, though we discussed it on our podcast. The whole story is pretty crazy -- involving a heavily hyped up company that appeared to basically be flat out lying to everyone about what it could do. The company still exists, but barely. The company's founder and CEO, who was plastered across magazine covers and compared frequently to Steve Jobs, has been banned from running a lab for two years, and the company is now facing a $140 million lawsuit from its biggest partner, Walgreens, who claims that Theranos repeatedly lied to...

Litigator David Boies and the law firm he founded, Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, have stopped doing legal work for Theranos Inc. after disagreeing about the strategy for handling ongoing government investigations of the blood-testing company, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Boies, 75 years old, has been one of the country’s best-known litigators since the late 1990s. He became Theranos’s outside counsel after being approached in 2011 by two investors in the Palo Alto, Calif., startup. He fiercely defended Theranos against questions about its technology and operations. Those efforts included threatening to take legal action against The...

Litigator David Boies and the law firm he founded, Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, have stopped doing legal work for Theranos Inc. after disagreeing about the strategy for handling ongoing government investigations of the blood-testing company, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Boies, 75 years old, has been one of the country’s best-known litigators since the late 1990s. He became Theranos’s outside counsel after being approached in 2011 by two investors in the Palo Alto, Calif., startup. He fiercely defended Theranos against questions about its technology and operations. Those efforts included threatening to take legal action against The...

It's worth asking why Elizabeth Holmes is still leading the embattled blood testing company Theranos Inc. But there may be a good reason why she still is in charge, one that has little to do with the scandal-ridden company's performance to date. Forget what venture capitalist Tim Draper — one of the first to invest in the Palo Alto company — implied this week that Holmes is being attacked because she's a young, female entrepreneur. The simple fact is that Theranos has not been able to deliver on its technology from a commercial, scientific or regulatory standpoint, and that falls...

2016 has not been too kind to Elizabeth Holmes, the Steve-Jobs wannabe in charge of fraudulent Theranos. She has thus far been banned for 2 years from operating labs, removed from hosting fundraisers for Hillary and lost her entire net worth. And now, the Wall Street Journal has published the "tell-all" story of the whistle-blower, 26 year old Tyler Shultz, who brought the the whole Theranos farce crashing down. It's a sordid tale complete with all the expected twists and turns of a Jason Bourne thriller including intimidation, coercion and private detectives. Tyler Shultz is the grandson of George Shultz,...

“We’re not going to hurt the people who have been paying into Social Security their whole life,” Trump declared, calling the payment of promised benefits “honoring a deal.” But the man heading the Trump transition team’s Social Security effort? Michael Korbey, a former lobbyist who has spent much of his career advocating for cutting and privatizing the program, according to Yahoo News. “It’s a failed system, broken and bankrupt,” Korbey said as a lobbyist in the mid 1990s. Korbey acknowledged that some of the reforms his group backed would hurt retirees, but “our constituents aren’t just senior citizens,” he told...

The typical retiree's monthly Social Security check will get only $3.92 bigger next year. That amounts to an increase of just 0.3% -- the smallest ever put in place to help cover higher prices. That's still an improvement from this year, when the lack of inflation kept benefits from increasing at all. The average retiree's monthly benefit is currently $1,305.30. "Over the last five years, Social Security COLA's have remained small or nonexistent," said AARP. "Every cent can matter to beneficiaries and their families. After last year's zero COLA, this year's announcement doesn't offer much help to the millions of...

Perhaps this is the reason the price of lifesaving EpiPens increased so dramatically: the single-largest purchaser of the pens in 2015 were taxpayers.The largest source of Mylan's increased revenue came from increased spending from Medicaid and Medicare for the devices. The price of the EpiPens has increased by over 400 percent since Medicaid and Medicare became a larger percentage of EpiPen's revenue. "The majority of Mylan's EpiPen revenue growth came from Medicare and Medicaid," Senator Chuck Grassley told NBC News in a statement after the Iowa Republican's office published an analysis of newly released data on rebates paid by the...

Death of a Society Destroying Marriage & the Family: An Essential Principle in the Culture of Death. Homily from 2008 before the election on the culture of death in our land. Father speaks of a story of an assisted suicide vote then brings in how the culture of death has attacked marriage & sex. For more please go to http://www.romans10seventeen.org/ & please say 3 Hail Marys for the priest Marriage provides a proper structure for family, and family is the unit cell of society. Society is made of families. Family is the building block of society. Changing the nature of...

Although we are still a month away from an official announcement about the size of the annual cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) for Social Security benefits in 2017, the latest Social Security Trustees report projects a 0.2% increase in benefits next year. That would boost the average Social Security retirement benefit of $1,341 per month by about $2.70 and increase the maximum benefit of $2,663 per month in 2016 by about $5.30 next year. While that would be an improvement over this year when there was no inflation adjustment over 2015 benefit levels, a small COLA will do little to shield seniors'...

Surgeons are speaking out against a Medicare proposal that would require them to use new billing codes to track their work in 10-minute increments during global surgical "packages" that span 10 days and 90 days, reports Medscape Medical News. The "packages" include preoperative and postoperative care as well as the procedure itself.

This rate of acceleration will, as I have repeatedly pointed out, bankrupt the Federal Government within the next administration's term. It will in fact exceed all current federal spending within the next 10 years. Neither of these events will actually come to pass because you cannot have a government when you can't pay the light bill in Washington DC. There is exactly one way to stop this from happening and that is to start prosecuting and imprisoning, right now, each and every instance of price-fixing (Sherman/Clayton), attempts to monopolize markets (Sherman/Clayton again), pricing discrimination of like kind and quantity for...

Only days after Judy Hanttula came home from the hospital after surgery last November, her doctor's office called with bad news: Records showed that instead of traditional Medicare, she had a private Medicare Advantage plan, and her doctor and hospital were not in its network. Neither the plan nor Medicare now would cover her medical costs. She owed $16,622. -- snip -- Hanttula said she ignored all mail from insurers because she had chosen traditional Medicare. "I felt like I had insured myself properly with Medicare," she said. "So I quit paying attention to the mail."

Despite a packed legislative agenda and shortened calendar, postal reform legislation has advanced in Congress. Both of the Senate bills shepherded by Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., have stalled, but the “Postal Service Reform Act of 2016” passed unanimously through the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform barely a month after it was introduced.The legislation, offered by Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, Ranking Member Elijah Cummings, D-Md., and others, includes a variety of measures members hope will shore up the Postal Service’s financial position. Unfortunately, the legislation fails to address either the financial situation or the need for the Postal Service...

One of the state’s wealthiest healthcare operators was arrested Friday at his Miami Beach waterfront estate on charges of orchestrating the nation’s biggest Medicare fraud scheme — $1 billion. Philip Esformes, 47, charged with two other defendants, is accused of exploiting his network of about 20 Miami-Dade skilled-nursing and assisted-living facilities to fleece the taxpayer-funded Medicare by filing false claims for services that were not necessary or in some instances not provided over the past 14 years. An unidentified local hospital referred some of the thousands of Medicare patients to his network through kickback payments to physicians and other medical...