Medicare and Medicaid At 50: One Is Going Bankrupt, the Other Is Bankrupting States

When President Johnson signed Medicare into law on June 30, 1965, he said , "If it has a few defects, I am confident those can be quickly remedied."
Fifty years later, a Government Accountability Office report found that an eye-popping $60 billion — fully 10% of Medicare's budget — was lost to waste, fraud, abuse or improper payments last year. Among the glaring defects, the GAO found 23,400 fake or bad addresses on Medicare's list of providers.


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Medicaid enrollment under ObamaCare soars, raising cost concerns

Several states that chose to expand Medicaid eligibility under ObamaCare now are facing deadline pressure to pay for it, the result of more signups than anticipated -- and, a looming reduction in how much of the bill the federal government will cover.

Read more at Fox News

Remember… only Democrats voted for this. --bc Read More......

Planned Parenthood: We’ll have to close clinics if Gov. Walker investigates us for Medicaid fraud

It's not even under investigation, but Planned Parenthood is worried it is coming to the end of the line in Scott Walker's Wisconsin.  Investigators with the state's Department of Health Office of Inspector General (OIG) say that two family planning facilities alone have charged the Medicaid program more than twice their allowable cost for birth control, overbilling taxpayers by millions of dollars a year. A spokesperson for Planned Parenthood Wisconsin admitted, if the state will demand that they follow the law as written, it would have to shut down its locations across the state.

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Report: 42 percent of new Medicaid signups are immigrants, their children

Immigrants and their U.S.-born children make up more than 40 percent of new Medicaid recipients at a cost of $4.6 billion, according to an analysis of government data.

The Center for Immigration Studies, a low-immigration advocacy group, released a report early Thursday that found both legal and illegal immigrants and their minor children made up 42 percent of Medicaid growth from 2011 to last year.

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Insurer Drops New York Medicaid Coverage For 53,000 Over Unsustainable Losses

Blue Cross Blue Shield in New York is dropping out of the state’s Medicaid program due to serious financial losses, dropping 53,000 New Yorkers from coverage.  Medicaid managed care patients in Erie, Chautauqua, Cattaraugus, Orleans, Wyoming and Allegany counties of New York will have until Oct. 31 to find new coverage. Blue Cross Blue Shield is one of the top Medicaid insurers in New York.

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HHS: 5.6M of 6M Who Signed Up on Exchanges Will Get Federal Funding

In their first three months of operation, the federal and state health-insurance marketplaces created under the Affordable Care Act—AKA Obamacare--have signed up 5,572,305 people who qualify to get federal funding for their health care, either through Medicaid or through an insurance premium subsidy, according to data released by the Department of Health and Human Service.

Those 5,572,305 are part of the “6 million Americans” HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said today have used the exchanges to sign up for health insurance or Medicaid.

Read more at CNS News

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How Medicaid Fails the Poor

Avik Roy, writer for The Apothecary at Forbes, joins Glenn Reynolds to discuss Medicaid, the federal health care program for the poor. Roy explains that most enrollments under Obamacare are in the Medicaid program, and that Medicaid is actually having a negative health impact [cites Oregon study on Medicaid outcomes among others]. Roy also references the successful Switzerland and Singapore models of universal health care insurance employing free-market principles. Hear more about the Obamacare debacle, and Roy's new book, How Medicaid Fails the Poor. (Video 10:32)

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Oregon Study: Medicaid 'Had No Significant Effect' On Health Outcomes vs. Being Uninsured

For three years, an incredibly nerdy—but consequential—debate has raged among health policy researchers regarding Medicaid, America’s government-run health-care program for the poor. Piles of studies have shown that people on Medicaid have health outcomes that are no better, and often worse, than those with no insurance at all. But supporters of Obamacare were cheered in 2011 when a lone study, out of Oregon, purported to show that Medicaid was better than being uninsured. Yesterday, however, the authors of the Oregon study published their updated, two-year results, finding that Medicaid “generated no significant improvement in measured physical health outcomes.”

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Cover Oregon Gets Federal Nod for Health Insurance Exchange

Yesterday the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) gave Oregon conditional approval for its plan to operate a health insurance exchange – called Cover Oregon – which will help connect thousands of Oregonians to health coverage. Oregon was among the first six states in the nation to receive conditional approval of its “blueprint” application. Read more at Cascade Business News... Read More......

A Constitutional Opening

Now that President Obama has won reelection, the states are grappling with implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. Last June, in NFIB v. Sebelius, the Supreme Court gave the act a mixed bill of constitutional health. It upheld the individual mandate by saying that it was constitutional under Congress’s taxing power. However, it also ruled that Congress could not compel the states to expand their Medicaid programs by threatening to cut off all Medicaid subsidies if they did not do so. Imposing onerous new requirements in a program that already represents such a large part of the states’ budgets that they can’t afford to lose federal subsidies, the Court ruled, is unconstitutional. This was the first significant limitation on the federal government’s power to use the strings attached to fiscal subsidies — “grants-in-aid,” as they used to be known — in order to make states implement federal policies.

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NRO: Oregon’s Verdict on Medicaid

NATIONAL REVIEW, 7/7/2011 by Michael F. Cannon - Oregon’s Verdict on Medicaid The facts come out.

Americans may be surprised to learn that little solid evidence exists to support the claim that expanding health insurance will improve the health and financial security of the uninsured; that some research calls into question whether broad coverage expansions improve health at all; and that some research even suggests that the overall benefits of such expansions may not be worth the cost. We lack definitive evidence because no developed nation has ever conducted a study that randomly assigns people to receive health insurance in order to control for other factors that might affect these outcomes. Until now. Read more at NRO...

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Championing the Status Quo

WASHINGTON POST, 8/10/2009 by Robert J. Samuelson (Hat tip: John H. Detweiler) - "The status quo is unsustainable for families, businesses and government." -- President Obama, June 13

One of the bewildering ironies of the health-care debate is that President Obama claims to be attacking the status quo when he's actually embracing it. Ever since Congress created Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, health politics has followed a simple logic: Expand benefits and talk about controlling costs. That's the status quo, and Obama faithfully adheres to it. While denouncing skyrocketing health spending, he would increase it by extending government health insurance to millions more Americans. Read more at the Washington Post... Read More......