GOP AGs may sue over health bill By: Alex Isenstadt December 24, 2009 05:57 AM EST
On the eve of an historic Senate health care reform vote, more than half of the Republican state attorneys general have organized to provide a legal analysis of the constitutionality of a controversial provision in the Senate bill and to explore potential legal challenges.
The provision in question is the result of a deal Senate Democratic leaders struck with Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson to win his critical vote. Under the agreement — dubbed the “Nebraska Compromise” or the “Cornhusker Kickback” by GOP critics — Nebraska will get an exemption from the state share of Medicaid expansion, a carve out that is expected to cost the federal government $100 million over 10 years.
South Carolina GOP Attorney General Henry McMaster, who is leading the effort, said the intent is to determine whether Congress had the power to allot funds to Nebraska differently from other states.
“I think it’s unprecedented to have this use of federal power,” said McMaster. “We heard about it, read about it, decided something needed to be done about it.”
McMaster began to organize the effort after South Carolina GOP Sens. Lindsey Graham and Jim DeMint wrote a letter to him Monday asking him to investigate the matter.
“We have serious concerns about this Nebraska compromise as it results in special treatment for only one state in the nation at the expense of the other 49,” wrote Graham and DeMint. “While South Carolina has to struggle to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars to comply with the massive new Medicaid mandate, Nebraska does not have to come up with a single dollar.”
McMaster told POLITICO Wednesday that 10 of the 19 GOP state attorneys general have signed on, with many of them taking part in a Tuesday conference call on the issue, and he expected more to join. .................>>>>................>>>>...................................http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1209/30949.html
subsidizing corn ethanol with healthcare as a 'green loophole'.......if your state lowers/contributes to 'environmentally friendly' businesses(we dont even know where to draw the line here)you get healthcare tax break........checkmate.....
...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......
The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.
STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS
CAPITAL REGION Groups: Change health care bill Schumer urged to protect New York interests BY MICHAEL LAMENDOLA Gazette Reporter
Associations representing counties and the health care industry are appealing to U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., to fi x problems in the Senate’s version of health care reform legislation, which they say could harm them financially. Schumer is scheduled to visit Schenectady today to tour Proctors. Representatives of the New York State Association of Counties and the Healthcare Association of New York State said the Senate’s legislation, passed on Christmas Eve, could chop jobs, curtail services and reduce the fl ow of money to counties and health care providers in New York unless modified. The U.S. House of Representatives approved its version of the legislation on Nov. 7. A final bill, which can reconcile association concerns, is expected early next year. Gov. David Paterson said the Senate’s bill would cost New York $1 billion annually, primarily by expanding Medicaid eligibility to include about 1.7 million uninsured New Yorkers. Matt Anderson of the state Division of Budget said the cost of Medicaid in 2009-2010 in New York was $49 billion. The federal government pays half that sum and, of the balance, the state pays two-thirds and the remainder comes from the counties. The counties’ contribution is capped. Under the Senate legislation, New York’s regular federal matching funds rate will remain essentially flat while the national average rate will rise to 65 percent or more. For some states, the federal government will pay 100 percent of these costs. Anderson said counties will be held harmless from having to pay more of the $1 billion costs New York state would incur under the Senate legislation. Stephen J. Acquario, executive director of the New York State Association of Counties, said the state, seeking to cover the added Medicaid cost, may put the squeeze ALSO INSIDE SCHUMER TO TOUR Proctors today, seeks to secure $900,000 for theater’s district energy plant. B1 on other revenue sources that normally go to counties. “We have been advised by the governor that the state will be penalized by the Senate bill at a time when the state has experienced the worse structural deficit since the Great Depression,” Acquario said. The state is looking at a $500 million current year deficit and $6 billion deficit for 2010-11. Acquario said the state has already started to withhold payments to counties for program year 2009 and may do so in subsequent years. “These are reimbursements for services already provided by counties months, if not years, ago,” he said. “This starts to cause some degree of anxiety because of the impact of all these numbers at the local level.” Anderson said the potential $1 billion additional cost could force further difficult decisions on reducing costs in other areas of the state budget. “It puts significant financial pressure on the state,” he said. ..............>>>>.....................>>>>.........................http://www.dailygazette.net/De.....r00100&AppName=1
A response to Mr. Hamilton’s Dec. 22 letter [“Health care a nice thing to have, but it’s hardly a ‘right’ ”] is needed. He states that health care should not be considered a right. He says “to ask for others to pay for health care is charity.” However, don’t we ask “others” to pay for our roads, our schools, our bridges, our stop signs, etc., etc.? This is not charity — it is just good government. He also says “choosing which causes serve the greater good is an individual choice.” He’s right, but it is also a distinctively government choice. Note that our Constitution says that “in order to form a more perfect Union” we the people need to, among other things listed, “promote the general Welfare.” And Article I, Section 8, says that Congress shall have the power to, among other things, provide for the “general Welfare” of the United States. Mr. Hamilton then goes on to say that health care is “sadly missing from the list” of rights explicitly named in the Declaration of Independence (not the Constitution). This seems to imply to him, at least, that health care is not a legitimate concern of our government. I submit that this is a very truncated view of our rights as Americans. Can you easily imagine one being able to enjoy the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness without having one’s health? Consequently, to assert a right to health care is to simply say that everyone should have a chance to realize the American Dream and that making health care available and affordable to all is one way our government can aid us in achieving that goal.
Jake Tapper pins Robert Gibbs like a butterfly. Posted by toughintn (Profile) Monday, December 28th at 7:51PM EST
As the guest host on Sunday’s “This Morning with George Stephanopoulos” show, Jake Tapper tried to school Robert Gibbs on the meaning of the word “transparency,” as well as the difference between public “voting” and secret “negotiations” on health care reform, but Gibbs was having none of it.
By his own admission, Tapper — “in the spirit of the Christmas season” — gave Gibbs more than one chance to explain away why President Obama is choosing to ignore his campaign pledge to “‘have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN, so the people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents and who is making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies.’” And even though Tapper used a wry restraint throughout his post about the verbal exchange, the title for the article says it all:
Gibbs Passes On One Last Chance to Make Health Care Negotiations Transparent Seeing at least one member of the mainstream media bring attention to the crucial intersection between Obama’s campaign promises and the health care mess? . . . Encouraging.
Watching him make fun of Gibbs in the process? . . . A late Christmas present.
Re Dec. 22 article, “Pre-Christmas passage on track”: We see one U.S. senator decided to vote for the health care bill after they gave his state extra money for Medicaid. We could use some of the Medicaid money here. The cost of Medicaid is killing the New York state budget. Come on, Sens. Schumer and Gillibrand. You mean you gave your vote away for free?
Thirteen Republican state attorneys general are threatening to file a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Senate health care bill.
“We ask that Congress delete the Nebraska provision from the pending legislation, as we prefer to avoid litigation,” writes McMaster. “Because this provision has serious implications for the country and the future of our nation’s legislative process, we urge you to take appropriate steps to protect the Constitution and the rights of the citizens of our nation. We believe this issue is readily resolved by removing the provision in question from the bill, and we ask that you do so.”
13 GOP AGs threaten health bill suit By: Alex Isenstadt December 30, 2009 07:02 PM EST
Thirteen Republican state attorneys general are threatening to file a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Senate health care bill.
In a letter sent to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid Wednesday, South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster said he had “grave concerns” about the deal Senate leaders cut with Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson to secure his crucial vote for the health care package.
“The current iteration of the bill contains a provision that affords special treatment to the state of Nebraska under the federal Medicaid program,” writes McMaster. “We believe this provision is constitutionally flawed. As chief legal officers of our states we are contemplating a legal challenge to this provision and we ask you to take action to render this challenge unnecessary by striking that provision.”
“In addition to violating the most basic and universally held notions of what is fair and just, we also believe this provision of H.R. 3590 is inconsistent with protections afforded by the United States Constitution against arbitrary legislation,” writes McMaster.
Under the terms of the agreement with Nelson, the federal government will pick up the full tab for all new Medicaid enrollees in Nebraska, a deal that’s expected to cost about $100 million over the next 10 years...................>>>>....................>>>>.....................http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1209/31078.html
Mayo Clinic in Arizona to Stop Treating Some Medicare Patients Share Business ExchangeTwitterFacebook| Email | Print | A A A
By David Olmos
Dec. 31 (Bloomberg) -- The Mayo Clinic, praised by President Barack Obama as a national model for efficient health care, will stop accepting Medicare patients as of tomorrow at one of its primary-care clinics in Arizona, saying the U.S. government pays too little.
More than 3,000 patients eligible for Medicare, the government’s largest health-insurance program, will be forced to pay cash if they want to continue seeing their doctors at a Mayo family clinic in Glendale, northwest of Phoenix, said Michael Yardley, a Mayo spokesman. The decision, which Yardley called a two-year pilot project, won’t affect other Mayo facilities in Arizona, Florida and Minnesota.
Obama in June cited the nonprofit Rochester, Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio for offering “the highest quality care at costs well below the national norm.” Mayo’s move to drop Medicare patients may be copied by family doctors, some of whom have stopped accepting new patients from the program, said Lori Heim, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, in a telephone interview yesterday.
“Many physicians have said, ‘I simply cannot afford to keep taking care of Medicare patients,’” said Heim, a family doctor who practices in Laurinburg, North Carolina. “If you truly know your business costs and you are losing money, it doesn’t make sense to do more of it.”
Medicare Loss
The Mayo organization had 3,700 staff physicians and scientists and treated 526,000 patients in 2008. It lost $840 million last year on Medicare, the government’s health program for the disabled and those 65 and older, Mayo spokeswoman Lynn Closway said.
Mayo’s hospital and four clinics in Arizona, including the Glendale facility, lost $120 million on Medicare patients last year, Yardley said. The program’s payments cover about 50 percent of the cost of treating elderly primary-care patients at the Glendale clinic, he said.
“We firmly believe that Medicare needs to be reformed,” Yardley said in a Dec. 23 e-mail. “It has been true for many years that Medicare payments no longer reflect the increasing cost of providing services for patients.”
Mayo will assess the financial effect of the decision in Glendale to drop Medicare patients “to see if it could have implications beyond Arizona,” he said.
Nationwide, doctors made about 20 percent less for treating Medicare patients than they did caring for privately insured patients in 2007, a payment gap that has remained stable during the last decade, according to a March report by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, a panel that advises Congress on Medicare issues. Congress last week postponed for two months a 21.5 percent cut in Medicare reimbursements for doctors.
National Participation
Medicare covered an estimated 45 million Americans at the end of 2008, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the agency in charge of the programs. While 92 percent of U.S. family doctors participate in Medicare, only 73 percent of those are accepting new patients under the program, said Heim of the national physicians’ group, citing surveys by the Leawood, Kansas-based organization.
Greater access to primary care is a goal of the broad overhaul supported by Obama that would provide health insurance to about 31 million more Americans. More family doctors are needed to help reduce medical costs by encouraging prevention and early treatment, Obama said in a June 15 speech to the American Medical Association meeting in Chicago.
Reid Cherlin, a White House spokesman for health care, declined comment on Mayo’s decision to drop Medicare primary care patients at its Glendale clinic.
Medicare Costs
Mayo’s Medicare losses in Arizona may be worse than typical for doctors across the U.S., Heim said. Physician costs vary depending on business expenses such as office rent and payroll. “It is very common that we hear that Medicare is below costs or barely covering costs,” Heim said.
Mayo will continue to accept Medicare as payment for laboratory services and specialist care such as cardiology and neurology, Yardley said.
Robert Berenson, a fellow at the Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center in Washington, D.C., said physicians’ claims of inadequate reimbursement are overstated. Rather, the program faces a lack of medical providers because not enough new doctors are becoming family doctors, internists and pediatricians who oversee patients’ primary care.
“Some primary care doctors don’t have to see Medicare patients because there is an unlimited demand for their services,” Berenson said. When patients with private insurance can be treated at 50 percent to 100 percent higher fees, “then Medicare does indeed look like a poor payer,” he said.
Annual Costs
A Medicare patient who chooses to stay at Mayo’s Glendale clinic will pay about $1,500 a year for an annual physical and three other doctor visits, according to an October letter from the facility. Each patient also will be assessed a $250 annual administrative fee, according to the letter. Medicare patients at the Glendale clinic won’t be allowed to switch to a primary care doctor at another Mayo facility.
A few hundred of the clinic’s Medicare patients have decided to pay cash to continue seeing their primary care doctors, Yardley said. Mayo is helping other patients find new physicians who will accept Medicare.
“We’ve had many patients call us and express their unhappiness,” he said. “It’s not been a pleasant experience.”
Mayo’s decision may herald similar moves by other Phoenix- area doctors who cite inadequate Medicare fees as a reason to curtail treatment of the elderly, said John Rivers, chief executive of the Phoenix-based Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association.
“We’ve got doctors who are saying we are not going to deal with Medicare patients in the hospital” because they consider the fees too low, Rivers said. “Or they are saying we are not going to take new ones in our practice.”
When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.” Adolph Hitler
If we do not include a public option in the health care bill, we are just funding the large HMOs with tax dollars. We would rather not have this bill if it just creates huge amounts of taxpayer money for the HMO feeding frenzy that is sure to follow. A public option would actually be creating jobs and economic activity for the real American workers in health care. Without the public option, we are just creating more jobs for the 2 percent of bureaucrats in the top-heavy organizations — with the same low-paying jobs for the 98 percent of real American workers.
Call and ask why your Democratic representatives aren't including tort reform or removing the restrictions so people could shop across state lines for the best health insurance rates if they really want to cut costs.
Call and ask why your Democratic representatives aren't including tort reform or removing the restrictions so people could shop across state lines for the best health insurance rates if they really want to cut costs.
Since they ignore us, after you call them, report their answer, or NONanswer, to your hometown newspaper as a letter to the editor. Maybe if we shame them publicly enough times, they will stop ignorting us somewhat.
Logged
