Word: medicaid
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Even as Congress struggles with how to pay for health-care reform, the White House keeps doing its best to accentuate the positive. Last week, Vice President Joe Biden hosted the country's three largest hospital trade groups as they announced they will accept $155 billion in Medicare and Medicaid cuts over the next 10 years. It's all part of an inspiring storyline, the idea that everyone is doing their part to make this most ambitious undertaking a reality. But no one actually thinks that the hospitals - or for that matter other key players like pharmaceutical manufacturers or doctors...
Should government-subsidized health coverage pay for abortion procedures? For more than three decades, that question had seemed pretty much settled. The Hyde Amendment, passed by the House on Sept., 30, 1976, forbade Medicaid - a program for poor people, jointly administered by Washington and the states, which had, up till then, paid for about 300,000 abortions a year - from using any federal money to pay for the procedure. All but 17 states followed suit, banning use of their own funds as well; with a few modifications, the ban has stood up ever since...
With or without physicians' support, the idea may be creeping forward. Last week, De Brantes was part of a group of health-payment reformers invited to the White House to explain how bundling works. Meanwhile, the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services recently started a three-year demonstration project that will provide bundled payments to hospitals and doctors at five sites for 37 common surgical procedures. The idea is that if hospitals and doctors are paid out of the same pot, they'll coordinate services to be more efficient and cost-effective. The results could help determine how aggressively...
...difficult to bird-dog. Though the Recovery Act was a single piece of legislation, it included thousands of funding streams for tens of thousands of projects. About $144 billion is allocated directly into state coffers for continuing existing programs that have been heavily burdened by the recession, like Medicaid. Hundreds of billions more have been set aside for tax cuts and continuing benefits to the poor and unemployed. The most visible part of the program, and the most politically explosive, is the roughly $152 billion for infrastructure investment, for which no one had a road map. In some cases, states...
Hanging over all these concerns is the prospect that a second stimulus bill may be needed to bail out states in late 2010 or 2011. State budgets have been drowning in red ink as jobless claims and Medicaid bills have skyrocketed; few expect those trends to ease soon. In June, White House counselor David Axelrod left open the possibility that a second stimulus may be needed. The White House is confronted with the prospect of having to ask for more money early next year - even as a group of voters is ready to dump the first stimulus right...