LePage plans DHHS shakeup
Posted March 09, 2012, at 3:31 p.m.
AUGUSTA, Maine — Department of Health and Human Services Commissioner Mary Mayhew faced grilling from lawmakers Friday over erroneous Medicaid payments as the administration prepared to shake up her department.
Mayhew told the Legislature’s Appropriations Committee that she should have alerted them sooner to a computing problem that led the state’s Medicaid program, known as MaineCare, to continue paying medical bills for up to 19,000 beneficiaries after they became ineligible for the program.
“In retrospect, when I was made aware of the concern and issue pertaining to eligibility, I should have brought it to your attention,” Mayhew said.
Mayhew said she was told about the eligibility problems in late January but the scope of the problem wasn’t clear until she was briefed on its potential impact last week.
The Web Is Awash in Reviews, but Not for Doctors. Here’s Why.
By RON LIEBER
For all the debate about which Web sites have the best model for reliable reviews — paid or unpaid, anonymous or real name, Angie’s List or Yelp or TripAdvisor — one thing is certain: a robust ecosystem exists online for restaurant and hotel reviews that has changed those industries for the better.
So it is puzzling that there is no such authoritative collection of reviews for physicians, the highest-stakes choice of service provider that most people make.
Sure, various Web sites like HealthGrades and RateMDs have taken their shots, and Yelp and Angie’s List have made a go of it, too. But the listings are often sparse, with few contributors and little of substance.
What we have here is a demand and supply problem: many people want this information, and more consumers would trust it if the sites had more robust offerings. But not enough people take the time to review their doctors. And fixing that problem means figuring out why.
Companies have tried to collect reviews of doctors since the early days of the Web, and RateMDs.com has gathered more than most. The founder, John Swapceinski, was inspired to create it after his success with a site called RateMyProfessors.com, which is well known for the “hotness” rating that college students assign (or not) to their teachers.
“Anything that people spend time or money on ought to be rated,” he said. RateMDs now has reviews of more than 1,370,000 doctors in the United States and Canada.
But getting in the faces of the previously untouchable professional class has inevitably led to legal threats. He says he gets about one each week over negative reviews and receives subpoenas every month or two for information that can help identify reviewers, who believe they are posting anonymously.
Health Care Exchange Rules to Be Set
By ROBERT PEAR
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is about to carry out a major provision of the new health care law by issuing standards for health insurance exchanges, the markets where consumers and small businesses will be able to buy coverage from competing private plans.
To encourage states to set up the exchanges, federal officials said, they will give state officials broad discretion to decide the operational details. However, the federal officials made clear that they would set up and operate an exchange in any state that refused to do so.
Federal officials said the rules showed how President Obama was moving to expand insurance coverage, even as critics attacked the health care law in Congress, in court and in campaigns for the White House and Congress.
The rules, to be issued within days, were described by two officials: Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, who testified at a Senate hearing on Wednesday, and Timothy B. Hill, a senior official at the department, who provided additional details on Thursday at a conference of America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade group.
White House Works to Shape Debate Over Health Law
By ROBERT PEAR
WASHINGTON — The White House has begun an aggressive campaign to use approaching Supreme Court arguments on the new health care law as a moment to build support for the measure seen asPresident Obama’s signature legislative achievement, hoping to shape public opinion on an issue at the center of the battle for the White House and Congress.
On Wednesday, White House officials summoned dozens of leaders of nonprofit organizations that strongly back the health law to help them coordinate plans for a prayer vigil, press conferences and other events outside the court when justices hear arguments for three days beginning March 26.
The advocates and officials mapped out a strategy to call attention to tangible benefits of the law, like increased insurance coverage for young adults. Sensitive to the idea that they were encouraging demonstrations, White House officials denied that they were trying to gin up support by encouraging rallies outside the Supreme Court, just a stone’s throw from Congress on Capitol Hill. They said a main purpose of this week’s meeting, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House, was to give the various groups a chance to learn of the plans.
For months, Democrats in Congress and progressive groups have urged the White House to make a more forceful defense of the health care law, which is denounced almost daily by Republican lawmakers and presidential candidates.
Obama Plans Big Effort to Build Support Among Women
By JACKIE CALMES
WASHINGTON — President Obama’s re-election campaign is beginning an intensified effort this week to build support among women, using the debate over the new health care law to amplify an appeal that already appears to be benefiting from partisan clashes over birth control and abortion.
On Monday, mailings will go out to one million women in more than a dozen battleground states in three separate versions for mothers, young women and older women, campaign and party officials said.
An effort called “Nurses for Obama” will begin on Wednesday, with nurses nationwide enlisted to be advocates for the health care law in their communities. And a new Web site will include links to video testimonials about the health care overhaul signed by Mr. Obama in 2010, including from a former critic who subsequently was found to have breast cancer.
At health-care reform’s key agency, no one stays in charge for long
By Gilbert M. Gaul,
The Obama administration is fighting to save its health-care reform law in the Supreme Court and the president is defending it on the campaign trail, where Republican candidates are promising to kill the Affordable Care Act. Yet even if President Obama prevails, he’s got a big problem: The agency that must implement the law has a revolving door at the top.
Since its creation in 1977, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (formerly called the Health Care Financing Administration) has had 29 administrators — with an average tenure of just 14 months. The longest-serving administrator held the job for four years and five months. The shortest terms were a few weeks. The CMS’s most recent acting administrator, Donald Berwick, stepped down in December after 16 months — and acting administrators have run the agency for more than seven of its 35 years. The Senate hasn’t confirmed a full-time administrator since 2006, a problem that Thomas A. Scully, a CMS administrator under President George W. Bush, once likened to going two years without a secretary of defense.
Op-Ed
McManus: Obama's healthcare albatross
The president kept his campaign pledge, but it could haunt him in November.
Columnist says health care law leads to single-payer rule
By Don Finley
Updated 11:30 a.m., Friday, March 9, 2012
If President Barack Obama's health care reform act is fully implemented over the next two years, it will evolve into a Canadian-style single-payer system that will forever change the social contract between Americans and their government, a nationally syndicated columnist and physician predicts.
And the leading Republican nominee for president, Mitt Romney, is in the weakest position of all the candidates to oppose it, said Washington Post columnist and Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer.
Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_news/article/Columnist-If-health-care-reform-act-is-fully-3392700.php#ixzz1oow62xSX
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_news/article/Columnist-If-Obamacare-implemented-single-payer-3392700.php
Medical bills can wreck credit, even when paid off
CHICAGO (AP) — Mike and Laura Park thought their credit record was spotless. The Texas couple wanted to take advantage of low interest rates, so they put their house on the market and talked to a lender about a mortgage on a bigger home in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs.Their credit report contained a shocker: A $200 medical bill had been sent to a collection agency. Although since paid, it still lowered their credit scores by about 100 points, and it means they'll have to pay a discount point to get the best interest rate. Cost to them: $2,500.
http://news.yahoo.com/medical-bills-wreck-credit-even-paid-off-183216201.html
EDITORIALS
Republicans in Legislature — get on board with health insurance help
Republicans in the Legislature are counting their Supreme Court votes before they’ve been cast. As is the case with many in their party, Republicans in Augusta are banking on the high court finding that some or all of the federal Affordable Care Act — better known as Obamacare — will be declared unconstitutional.
Being privately hopeful or even confident of a court ruling is one thing. But failing to do the work required by the federal law to bring funds into Maine and help middle class families have health coverage is unconscionable.
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