Priorities
How many billions of tax payer dollars have been bilked recirculated to the ownership society defense contractors and oil field services by the illegal, immoral invasion and occupation of Iraq?
I love the health care issue because it is the most pervasive, affecting every company and every individual in the country, and is an excellent demonstration of how thefeudal lords crusaders repiglikkkans will choose money over Jesus life every day of the week.
House Panel Approves Medicaid Cuts
By Andrew Taylor Associated Press Writer
Published: Oct 28, 2005
WASHINGTON (AP) - A key House committee late Thursday approved a proposal to curb Medicaid spending by about $9.5 billion by the end of the decade, advancing a plan to slow spending on the federal government's health care program for the poor and disabled.
The Energy and Commerce Committee voted a party-line 28-22 for the measure, over protests from panel Democrats who said Republicans were trying to cut the deficit on the backs of poor. Republicans countered that they were making only modest trims - about 1 percent - in a program predicted to cost $1.1 trillion over the same period.
The Medicaid measure is to be folded into a sprawling budget bill to implement Republican plans that would, for the first time in eight years, take on the growth of federal programs such as food stamps, farm subsidies and student loan subsidies. The plan also would also raise revenue by auctioning television airwaves to wireless companies and leasing parts of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling.
The belt-tightening comes even as the Senate on Thursday approved by voice vote $8 billion in emergency spending to prepare vaccines and antiviral drugs and make sure health facilities are ready for an outbreak of much-feared bird flu.
And the White House is expected to ask Congress on Friday to redirect $17 billion in already approved hurricane relief funds to projects like repairing highways and federal facilities damaged by the storms.
Such moves illustrate the pressure to boost spending, even as the Republican-dominated House implements its budget plans. The Senate is scheduled to debate a companion $39 billion deficit-cutting plan starting Monday.
The House Medicaid plan would impose new co-payments on Medicaid beneficiaries and would allow states to scale back coverage. It also would tighten rules designed to limit the ability of elderly people to shed assets in order to qualify for nursing home care, lower pharmacy profit margins and encourage pharmacies to issue generic drugs.
The House bill would extract significantly less savings from drug manufacturers and pharmacies than would a companion Senate measure. Beneficiaries would bear a greater share of the cuts, with advocates for the poor noting that working families would shoulder the greatest burden.
And, for the first time, people with significant home equity of $500,000 would be ineligible for nursing home care under Medicaid.
"Medicaid is a victim of its own success. The program has grown so expansive that it is unsustainable in its current form," said panel Chairman Joe Barton, R-Texas. "The reforms we are offering ... will help to save the program while at the same time protecting the poorest of our society."
Panel Democrats lost a series of votes to ease the cuts.
The Senate, meanwhile, completed floor action on fiscal 2006 spending bills, voting 94-3 to pass a massive measure covering health, education and labor programs.
The legislation, the largest of the spending bills Congress considers every year, includes $146 billion for non-entitlement programs and about $458 billion for benefits such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Among the programs are $29.4 billion for the National Institutes of Health, $6.9 billion for Head Start and $12.8 billion in aid for high-poverty schools.
Citing budgetary restraints, the GOP-led Senate rejected mainly Democratic proposals to boost spending significantly for such programs as the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, funded at $2.2 billion; Pell grants, budgeted at $13.2 billion; and the Individuals with Disabilities Act, funded at $11.7 billion.
The legislation now goes to House-Senate negotiations. So far Congress has completed, and the president has signed, only three of the 11 spending bills that fund federal programs for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1.
The Agriculture Committee, meanwhile, postponed until Friday a vote on a $3.7 billion plan to curb farm subsidies and tighten eligibility requirements for the food stamp program. The committee's earlier target was slightly higher but GOP leaders gave panel Chairman Robert Goodlatte, R-Va., a break after another committee exceeded its savings goal.
With a lower savings target, Goodlatte dropped one of his more controversial food stamp proposals - which would block states from extending benefits for childless adults facing hardships such as homelessness - and modified another affecting legal immigrants.
AP-ES-10-28-05 0036EDT
And from the paper that brought you the second term
October 30, 2005
Congress Weighs Big Cuts to Medicaid and Medicare
By ROBERT PEAR
WASHINGTON, Oct. 29 - Congressional committees have proposed substantial cutbacks in Medicaid and Medicare, the nation's largest health insurance programs, which together cover more than one-fourth of all Americans.
The two houses of Congress are expected to approve the changes in the next two weeks as part of competing bills to slow the growth of federal spending. Negotiators from the two chambers would then try to work out the differences.
The House bill would take all of its savings from Medicaid, the program for low-income people, while leaving Medicare, the program for those 65 and older and the disabled, untouched, as the Bush administration wants. By contrast, the Senate bill would squeeze savings from both programs.
Under the House bill, states would gain sweeping authority to charge premiums, increase co-payments and trim benefits for Medicaid recipients, so benefit packages would look more like the private insurance provided by employers.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated that these changes would save the federal government more than $4 billion in the next five years, with savings of more than $3 billion for the states.
Governors of both parties, troubled by the soaring cost of Medicaid, have been pleading with Congress to let them make such changes. They said their record on welfare showed they could be trusted with the new authority.
Under the current Medicaid law and rules, co-payments for most adults cannot exceed $3 for goods and services like prescription drugs and visits to doctors.
The House bill, drafted by Representative Joe L. Barton, Republican of Texas, would gradually increase the maximum co-payment, to $5 in 2008. In later years, the ceiling would rise automatically, to match increases in the consumer price index for medical care.
States could end coverage for Medicaid recipients who refused to pay premiums, and health care providers could deny services to those who failed to pay the new charges. Poor children under 18 years old would be exempt from cost-sharing requirements.
"I trust the states," said Mr. Barton, the chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce.
Representative Nathan Deal, Republican of Georgia, said, "If people have a personal stake in the cost of their health care, they will use it more responsibly."
But Representative Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin, said, "Higher co-payments will lead people to forgo needed medical care."
"To listen to some of the personal responsibility arguments," Ms. Baldwin said, "one might think that people line up to see their doctors the way they line up to see a rock concert or sporting event, and the only way to control this irrational hunger or thirst for medical care is to make it more expensive. I just don't buy that."
Federal auditors and investigators have repeatedly found that Medicaid overpays pharmacies. The Senate and House bills would reduce those payments. The Senate bill would also require drug manufacturers to give larger discounts to Medicaid, a provision not included in the House bill.
Craig L. Fuller, president of the National Association of Chain Drug Stores, a trade group, said he did not understand how House Republicans could cut payments to pharmacies and increase co-payments for poor people without requiring drug manufacturers to make any contribution to the savings.
But Billy Tauzin, president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a lobbying organization for brand-name drug companies, said the price concessions required by the Senate bill could hurt Medicaid recipients and other patients by forcing drug makers to "reduce research and development of life-saving medicines."
The White House has told lawmakers that they should not tamper with Medicare. President Bush does not want Congress to alter the prescription drug benefit, scheduled to take effect Jan. 1, or other provisions of the 2003 Medicare law.
House Republican leaders followed that advice, but the Senate did not. The Senate Finance Committee voted to eliminate a $10 billion fund that can be used to increase payments to private insurers, as an incentive for them to enter and stay in the Medicare program.
The committee chairman, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said the money was not immediately needed because private plans were rushing into Medicare.
The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, an independent federal panel, has urged Congress to eliminate the $10 billion fund, saying it gives an unfair advantage to plans known as regional preferred provider organizations, or P.P.O.'s.
Karen M. Ignagni, president of America's Health Insurance Plans, an industry trade group, said, "This fund has been described as a slush fund by critics, but the reality is that beneficiaries, not health plans, will be helped by this funding."
With the extra payments, Ms. Ignagni said, more insurers would offer low-cost, high-quality benefits to people in rural areas and other markets where such options were unavailable.
The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association warned Congress that if it eliminated the $10 billion fund, it would show that "the government is an unreliable business partner." Blue Cross lobbyists said this would cause some insurers to reconsider their participation in Medicare.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
I love the health care issue because it is the most pervasive, affecting every company and every individual in the country, and is an excellent demonstration of how the
House Panel Approves Medicaid Cuts
By Andrew Taylor Associated Press Writer
Published: Oct 28, 2005
WASHINGTON (AP) - A key House committee late Thursday approved a proposal to curb Medicaid spending by about $9.5 billion by the end of the decade, advancing a plan to slow spending on the federal government's health care program for the poor and disabled.
The Energy and Commerce Committee voted a party-line 28-22 for the measure, over protests from panel Democrats who said Republicans were trying to cut the deficit on the backs of poor. Republicans countered that they were making only modest trims - about 1 percent - in a program predicted to cost $1.1 trillion over the same period.
The Medicaid measure is to be folded into a sprawling budget bill to implement Republican plans that would, for the first time in eight years, take on the growth of federal programs such as food stamps, farm subsidies and student loan subsidies. The plan also would also raise revenue by auctioning television airwaves to wireless companies and leasing parts of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling.
The belt-tightening comes even as the Senate on Thursday approved by voice vote $8 billion in emergency spending to prepare vaccines and antiviral drugs and make sure health facilities are ready for an outbreak of much-feared bird flu.
And the White House is expected to ask Congress on Friday to redirect $17 billion in already approved hurricane relief funds to projects like repairing highways and federal facilities damaged by the storms.
Such moves illustrate the pressure to boost spending, even as the Republican-dominated House implements its budget plans. The Senate is scheduled to debate a companion $39 billion deficit-cutting plan starting Monday.
The House Medicaid plan would impose new co-payments on Medicaid beneficiaries and would allow states to scale back coverage. It also would tighten rules designed to limit the ability of elderly people to shed assets in order to qualify for nursing home care, lower pharmacy profit margins and encourage pharmacies to issue generic drugs.
The House bill would extract significantly less savings from drug manufacturers and pharmacies than would a companion Senate measure. Beneficiaries would bear a greater share of the cuts, with advocates for the poor noting that working families would shoulder the greatest burden.
And, for the first time, people with significant home equity of $500,000 would be ineligible for nursing home care under Medicaid.
"Medicaid is a victim of its own success. The program has grown so expansive that it is unsustainable in its current form," said panel Chairman Joe Barton, R-Texas. "The reforms we are offering ... will help to save the program while at the same time protecting the poorest of our society."
Panel Democrats lost a series of votes to ease the cuts.
The Senate, meanwhile, completed floor action on fiscal 2006 spending bills, voting 94-3 to pass a massive measure covering health, education and labor programs.
The legislation, the largest of the spending bills Congress considers every year, includes $146 billion for non-entitlement programs and about $458 billion for benefits such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Among the programs are $29.4 billion for the National Institutes of Health, $6.9 billion for Head Start and $12.8 billion in aid for high-poverty schools.
Citing budgetary restraints, the GOP-led Senate rejected mainly Democratic proposals to boost spending significantly for such programs as the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, funded at $2.2 billion; Pell grants, budgeted at $13.2 billion; and the Individuals with Disabilities Act, funded at $11.7 billion.
The legislation now goes to House-Senate negotiations. So far Congress has completed, and the president has signed, only three of the 11 spending bills that fund federal programs for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1.
The Agriculture Committee, meanwhile, postponed until Friday a vote on a $3.7 billion plan to curb farm subsidies and tighten eligibility requirements for the food stamp program. The committee's earlier target was slightly higher but GOP leaders gave panel Chairman Robert Goodlatte, R-Va., a break after another committee exceeded its savings goal.
With a lower savings target, Goodlatte dropped one of his more controversial food stamp proposals - which would block states from extending benefits for childless adults facing hardships such as homelessness - and modified another affecting legal immigrants.
AP-ES-10-28-05 0036EDT
And from the paper that brought you the second term
October 30, 2005
Congress Weighs Big Cuts to Medicaid and Medicare
By ROBERT PEAR
WASHINGTON, Oct. 29 - Congressional committees have proposed substantial cutbacks in Medicaid and Medicare, the nation's largest health insurance programs, which together cover more than one-fourth of all Americans.
The two houses of Congress are expected to approve the changes in the next two weeks as part of competing bills to slow the growth of federal spending. Negotiators from the two chambers would then try to work out the differences.
The House bill would take all of its savings from Medicaid, the program for low-income people, while leaving Medicare, the program for those 65 and older and the disabled, untouched, as the Bush administration wants. By contrast, the Senate bill would squeeze savings from both programs.
Under the House bill, states would gain sweeping authority to charge premiums, increase co-payments and trim benefits for Medicaid recipients, so benefit packages would look more like the private insurance provided by employers.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated that these changes would save the federal government more than $4 billion in the next five years, with savings of more than $3 billion for the states.
Governors of both parties, troubled by the soaring cost of Medicaid, have been pleading with Congress to let them make such changes. They said their record on welfare showed they could be trusted with the new authority.
Under the current Medicaid law and rules, co-payments for most adults cannot exceed $3 for goods and services like prescription drugs and visits to doctors.
The House bill, drafted by Representative Joe L. Barton, Republican of Texas, would gradually increase the maximum co-payment, to $5 in 2008. In later years, the ceiling would rise automatically, to match increases in the consumer price index for medical care.
States could end coverage for Medicaid recipients who refused to pay premiums, and health care providers could deny services to those who failed to pay the new charges. Poor children under 18 years old would be exempt from cost-sharing requirements.
"I trust the states," said Mr. Barton, the chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce.
Representative Nathan Deal, Republican of Georgia, said, "If people have a personal stake in the cost of their health care, they will use it more responsibly."
But Representative Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin, said, "Higher co-payments will lead people to forgo needed medical care."
"To listen to some of the personal responsibility arguments," Ms. Baldwin said, "one might think that people line up to see their doctors the way they line up to see a rock concert or sporting event, and the only way to control this irrational hunger or thirst for medical care is to make it more expensive. I just don't buy that."
Federal auditors and investigators have repeatedly found that Medicaid overpays pharmacies. The Senate and House bills would reduce those payments. The Senate bill would also require drug manufacturers to give larger discounts to Medicaid, a provision not included in the House bill.
Craig L. Fuller, president of the National Association of Chain Drug Stores, a trade group, said he did not understand how House Republicans could cut payments to pharmacies and increase co-payments for poor people without requiring drug manufacturers to make any contribution to the savings.
But Billy Tauzin, president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a lobbying organization for brand-name drug companies, said the price concessions required by the Senate bill could hurt Medicaid recipients and other patients by forcing drug makers to "reduce research and development of life-saving medicines."
The White House has told lawmakers that they should not tamper with Medicare. President Bush does not want Congress to alter the prescription drug benefit, scheduled to take effect Jan. 1, or other provisions of the 2003 Medicare law.
House Republican leaders followed that advice, but the Senate did not. The Senate Finance Committee voted to eliminate a $10 billion fund that can be used to increase payments to private insurers, as an incentive for them to enter and stay in the Medicare program.
The committee chairman, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said the money was not immediately needed because private plans were rushing into Medicare.
The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, an independent federal panel, has urged Congress to eliminate the $10 billion fund, saying it gives an unfair advantage to plans known as regional preferred provider organizations, or P.P.O.'s.
Karen M. Ignagni, president of America's Health Insurance Plans, an industry trade group, said, "This fund has been described as a slush fund by critics, but the reality is that beneficiaries, not health plans, will be helped by this funding."
With the extra payments, Ms. Ignagni said, more insurers would offer low-cost, high-quality benefits to people in rural areas and other markets where such options were unavailable.
The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association warned Congress that if it eliminated the $10 billion fund, it would show that "the government is an unreliable business partner." Blue Cross lobbyists said this would cause some insurers to reconsider their participation in Medicare.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
posted by TheFuriousGourmet | 7:25 PM
1 Comments:
Blue cross of California are a great health insurance provider. Health insurance is a major aspect to many and blue cross can help everyone get covered.
Post a Comment
<< Home