Free Republic

"War is the health of the state," wrote the progressive Randolph Bourne during the First World War, after which he succumbed to the Spanish flu. America's war on the coronavirus pandemic promises to be no exception to the axiom. However long this war requires, the gargantuan state will almost surely emerge triumphant. Currently, the major expenditures of the U.S. government, as well as a growing share of total federal spending, are Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. None of these programs will be curtailed or reduced this year or next. And if the Democrats win in November, the nation will likely...

What would you do to save your local hospital? That question is on the mind of many lawmakers in states struggling with whether or not to expand Medicaid to able-bodied adults under ObamaCare. Advocates of expansion have time and again pitched expansion as a way to save struggling, rural hospitals across the nation. More recently, activists are pitching Medicaid expansion as a response to the COVID-19 outbreak. As more hospitals find themselves in financial trouble, expanding Medicaid is promised to be the cure-all: not only will it save hospitals from closing, but it’ll create jobs too (or so advocates say)....

Hillary Clinton Appeals Federal Court Order to Go Under Oath Where are Hillary Clinton’s Text Messages? FBI Cleared Extremists Who Carried Out Deadliest U.S. Attacks Since 9/11 U.S. Makes $175 Billion in Payments “That Should Not Have Been Made” Hillary Clinton Appeals Federal Court Order to Go Under Oath In another desperate attempt by the Clinton machine to delay truth and accountability for her email conduct and how it impacted the people’s “right to know” under FOIA, lawyers for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her former Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills have asked the Court of Appeals...

New York is set to get $750 million a month in coronavirus economic stimulus legislation that’s currently being finalized, Sen. Chuck Schumer tells The Post. The Democratic Senate minority leader said Thursday that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) signed off on the Empire State funding and that he hasn’t heard of objections from the White House or Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who is negotiating with Pelosi. Schumer said he scored the haul by temporarily adjusting the state’s Medicaid reimbursement rate. Right now, the federal government pays 50 percent of expenses for Medicaid in New York. Under the deal, the feds...

The United States filed a complaint under the False Claims Act against Mallinckrodt ARD LLC, formerly known as Mallinckrodt ARD Inc. and previously Questcor Pharmaceuticals Inc. (collectively, Mallinckrodt), in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, the Department of Justice announced today.  The government alleges that Mallinckrodt has violated the False Claims Act by knowingly underpaying Medicaid rebates due as a result of large increases in the price of its drug H.P. Acthar Gel (Acthar). “The Medicaid Rebate Statute provides an important check on rising drug prices,� said Assistant Attorney General Jody Hunt of the Department of Justice’s...

Pastor Antonio Velasquez says that before the Trump administration announced a crackdown on immigrants using government social services, people lined up before sunrise outside a state office in a largely Latino Phoenix neighborhood to sign up for food stamps and Medicaid. No more. 'You had to arrive at 3 in the morning, and it might take you until the end of the day,' he said, pointing behind the office in the Maryvale neighborhood to show how long the lines got. But no one lined up one recent weekday morning, and there were just a handful of people inside. With new...

Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a scathing rebuke of the court's decision to allow the Trump administration to enforce its "public charge" rule in the state of Illinois, limiting which non-citizens can obtain visas to enter the U.S. Sotomayor's problems with the conservative majority's ruling went far beyond this case, claiming that it was symptomatic of the court's habit of siding with the government when they seek emergency stays of rulings against them. "It is hard to say what is more troubling: that the Government would seek this extraordinary relief seemingly as a matter of course, or that...

Spending on an increasingly popular New York Medicaid program that lets the elderly and disabled hire people, including their own relatives, to care for them at home soared 85 percent between 2017 and 2018. The Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program – CDPAP for short – is intended to keep people out of high-cost nursing homes and other institutions. But a 2018 federal audit criticized New York for not keeping an eye on the program. “New York’s lack of effective monitoring of the CDPAP leaves the program vulnerable to misuse of federal funds and could potentially place beneficiaries at harm,” the...

President Donald Trump said he wouldn’t touch Medicare before pitching a budget plan that would do exactly that, along with steep cuts to Medicaid. Democrats are calling it “savage” and “heartless,” while administration officials are insisting they are only slowing explosive growth in future years and that current Medicare benefits would remain untouched. Here are three things to know about the election-year fight on health care spending: Trump proposed spending $1.6 trillion less on future health care spending, including $451 billion less for Medicare. On Twitter, two days before releasing his budget, the president said, “we will not be touching...

Governors of both major political parties are warning that a little-noticed regulation proposed by President Donald Trump’s administration could lead to big cuts in Medicaid, reducing access to health care for low-income Americans. The arcane fiscal accountability rule proposed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, would tighten federal oversight and approval over complex financing strategies states have long used to help pay for their share of the $600 billion program. Also targeted are certain payments to hospitals that treat many low-income patients. Public comments closed last week amid a chorus of criticism from hospitals, nursing homes,...

The City Pages hit, and Planned Parenthood not liking the billboards, is not just about a disagreement over a controversial issue. It’s about money. Two pro-life billboards were taken down in St. Paul, after the billboard stand owner—who remains unknown—threatened the billboard company, Clear Channel, that the stand owner would not renew the lease with Clear Channel unless the billboards were taken down.One billboard gave the website and number for abortion pill reversal (877-558-0333), and another the phone number and website for women facing an unplanned pregnancy, OptionLine.org (800-712-4357). Both advertisements were taken out by Pro-Life Action Ministries (PLAM).PLAM strategically...

The Trump administration plans to release guidance as soon as this month for granting states waivers to convert Medicaid funding to block grants, according to two people familiar with the matter, paving the way for a transformation of the 55-year-old program that is likely to reignite a partisan feud. The impending release comes as a surprise after the Office of Management and Budget, which reviews regulatory actions, indicated in November that block-grant instructions had been withdrawn. Lawmakers and legal advisers speculated that the guidance may have been shelved or significantly delayed. Approving state waivers to change Medicaid funding to block...

The Illinois Medicaid program will now cover transgender surgeries for qualifying patients in the Prairie State. In Orwellian fashion the procedures for so-called gender transition are referred to as “gender-affirming” when in reality they do not affirm biological and anatomical realities but instead affirm a person’s perceived gender identity.The procedure must be determined “medically necessary,” according to a provider notice posted by the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services. One of the requirements for this designation is that the patient be diagnosed with Gender Dysphoria. Those seeking genital surgery must meet more stringent requirements than those seeking non-genitalia related...

At the end of 2009, the total federal debt was $12.3 trillion—a staggering amount of money. Now, it stands at an astonishing $23.1 trillion. That’s roughly $180,500 of debt for every U.S. household. It is important for Americans to understand how we got here, and what lawmakers can do to bring back fiscal sanity. Poor Handling of the Financial Crisis The federal government entered the 2010s with sky-high annual deficits. This had two primary causes. First, the Great Recession reduced incomes and profits, which meant a sharp decrease in tax revenue. A slow economic recovery kept tax revenue relatively low...

With the current third-party payment structure, you doctor does not practice as much medicine on you as insurance executives and federal bureaucrats do. Americans, who practices medicine on you? The answer may seem self-evident, but it is not. In our current health-care system, millions of nameless, faceless government or private insurance bureaucrats practice medicine on you without a license for medicine.You may think your life is in your doctor’s hands, but it is not. The bureaucrats, not you or your doctor, make your medical and financial decisions. Consider these health-care decisions: DiagnosisTreatment: what, when, where, by whomMedicationsPaying for care Your...

ALBANY – In 2020, state officials will examine whether to turn to New York residents and businesses for more tax revenues. With the state facing a gaping hole in its finances, and if history is an already well-known guide to New Yorkers, that’s hardly a bold prediction. But how? That’s the $6.1 billion question. The new state budget is due in March, and Democrats who control the state Capitol are already talking about potentially major tax hikes on wealthy individuals and corporations. Considering past red-ink periods in the annals of state budget-making, however, low and middle class taxpayers could get...

WASHINGTON — Although the courts have so far blocked President Trump’s attempts to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients, his administration announced on Thursday that it would allow a 10th state, South Carolina, to condition Medicaid eligibility for many poor adults on proving that they work or engage in other activities, like volunteering. It is the first time the Trump administration has approved such rules in a state whose working-age Medicaid population consists almost entirely of poor mothers. Unlike most of the other states that have won approval for work requirements, South Carolina chose not to expand Medicaid to most...

A federal judge has ruled the taxpayer-funded Medicaid program must cover transgender surgery in Wisconsin.Judge William Conley, of U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin, an Obama appointee, said a 1997 state regulation that excluded transgender treatments and surgeries from Medicaid coverage violated federal law, including the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare; the federal Medicaid Act; and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.A press release at National Health Law Program (NHeLP), which joined with other law firms in the class action lawsuit that challenged the exclusion, noted the state did not appeal the ruling “and has agreed...

It's often said that our federal system of government allows states wide latitude to experiment with ways to make government more efficient or just work better. There are numerous examples where pilot programs begun at the state level end up being adopted by Washington.But such experimentation has never been tried on Medicaid reforms. Medicaid is run by the states but every state is reimbursed a certain amount by Washington for every program beneficiary. It's a program that cries out for drastic reforms. The Medicaid program is racked with incompetence  and corruption. Just last year, it was discovered in an...

Medicaid expansion was a key component of ObamaCare. In 2014 when the expansion started, the feds stopped doing audits of states’ Medicaid eligibility determinations. The Obama administration’s goal was to build public support for the new law by signing up as many people as possible. Now, after a four-year hiatus, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have begun auditing program eligibility again. According to a report released Monday, the audits found “high levels of observed eligibility errors,” meaning a significant number of people are enrolled in Medicaid who shouldn’t be. Our analysis of the CMS report suggests that the...