LePage must restore trust if he's to correct DHHS shortfall
Published on Sunday, Mar 25, 2012 at 12:12 am | Last updated on Sunday, Mar 25, 2012 at 12:12 am
All the time Gov. Paul LePage was insisting that 65,000 Mainers must be dropped immediately from the Medicaid rolls because the state couldn’t afford to pay for them, his administration was providing Medicaid benefits to 19,000 ineligible people. The significance of these events has still not quite sunk in at the State House, but it’s beginning to.
Support programs succeeding at keeping Maine seniors in their own homes
Posted March 25, 2012, at 7:53 p.m.
DEER ISLE, Maine — Marnie Reed Crowell was a healthy woman in her 60s when a fall while ice skating one Sunday afternoon changed both her life and her perspective on growing old in rural Maine.
The traumatic head injury she suffered left the Deer Isle resident and author unable to write, drive and perform many basic tasks. During her years-long recovery, Crowell said she realized the challenges faced by many older or disabled Mainers struggling to live independently.
“I had a church, I had 40 years of friendships, and I had a sibling a few miles awa, and it wasn’t enough,” Crowell said.
A decade later, Crowell is part of a nascent but growing movement in Maine – one of the nation’s oldest states demographically — focused on developing support systems that will enable seniors or disabled Mainers to stay in their homes, albeit with a little help.
Why health care is permanently changed under Obama act
Posted March 25, 2012, at 4:35 a.m.
WASHINGTON — In February 2009, Michael Zucker told a group of highly paid surgeons something they did not want to hear: The way they earned a salary was about to change.
Zucker is the chief development officer at Baptist Health System, a five-hospital network in San Antonio. For 37 common surgeries, such as hip replacements and pacemaker implants, he said, the system would soon collect “bundled” Medicare payments. Traditionally, hospitals and doctors had collected separate fees for each step of such procedures; now they would get a lump sum for treating everything related to the patient’s condition.
If a hospital delivered care for less than the bundled rate, while hitting certain quality metrics, it would keep the difference as profit. But if costs were high and quality was too low, Baptist would lose money. For the first time in their careers, the doctors’ paychecks depended on the quality of the care they provided.
Four surgeons quit in protest.
“I’d describe the reception as lukewarm at best,” Zucker says. “There was a lot of: ‘How could you do this?’ and ‘I’m not going to participate.’ ”
In Health Care Case, Lawyers Train for 3-Day Marathon
By ADAM LIPTAK
WASHINGTON — The three days of Supreme Court arguments that start Monday on the constitutionality of President Obama’s health care law will be a legal marathon, and the lawyers involved have been training.
Last week, there were so many of the mock arguments that lawyers call moot courts that they threatened to exhaust something that had never been thought in short supply: Washington lawyers willing to pretend to be Supreme Court justices.
The problem, said Paul D. Clement, who represents the 26 states challenging the law, was not just the length of the arguments the court will hear, but the variety of topics to be addressed.
The law itself is a sprawling revision of the health care system meant to provide coverage to tens of millions of previously uninsured Americans by imposing new requirements on states, employers and insurance companies and, through what has been called the individual mandate, by requiring most Americans to obtain insurance or pay a penalty.
Health Act Arguments Open With Obstacle From 1867
By ADAM LIPTAK
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday starts three days of hearings on the constitutionality of the 2010 health care overhaul law, an epic clash that could recast the very structure of American government. But it begins with a 90-minute argument on what a lawyer in the case has called “the most boring jurisdictional stuff one can imagine.”
Indeed, the lawyer, Paul D. Clement, who represents the 26 states challenging the law, said this month in remarks at the Georgetown University Law Center that the first day’s arguments are “a kind of practical joke that the court is playing on the public.”
The main event — arguments over the constitutionality of the law’s requirement that most Americans obtain insurance or pay a penalty — will not come until Tuesday. But early Monday morning, crowds continued to grow outside the court, as people gathered to demonstrate their support, or their opposition, to the health care law.
A sprawling picket of supporters of the law wound its way around morning commuters, police officers, TV camera crews and photographers, chanting, “Protect our law, protect our care.” Robert Yochem, a 45-year-old political activist from Baltimore, who described himself as a “general do-gooder,” said he had come early Monday to show his support for the law. Opponents of the law were in short supply, an absence that puzzled Mr. Yochem.
“They might show up later, I don’t know,” he said, standing facing a line of traffic on First Street in the bright morning sunshine with a sign that read, “Protect my health care.”
In the first case, the justices will consider whether they are barred from hearing the case until the first penalties come due in 2015.
Waiting (and Sleeping) in Line, for View of Health Care History
By EMMARIE HUETTEMAN
WASHINGTON — Time becomes an abstract concept after you have spent 47 hours sitting on the sidewalk outside the Supreme Court.
Searching her memory, Kathie McClure, a 57-year-old trial lawyer from Atlanta, struggled to recall when the fight broke out over the fourth and fifth spots in line to attend this week’s arguments in a constitutional challenge to the health care law. It was sometime on Saturday, she remembered. But was it before or after the “Road to Repeal” Tea Party rally, which started at noon? And when was it that she ducked into a Starbucks to warm up after being out in the rain?
At Ailing Brooklyn Hospital, Insider Deals and Lavish Perks
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
In recent years, Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in Brooklyn has often gone hat in hand to the city and state, lamenting cuts in government assistance and questioning whether officials truly understood the burden of running a nonprofit hospital in Bushwick, one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
For much of that time, Wyckoff’s chief executive was driving to work in a Bentley Continental GT, a $160,000 automobile, and at one point, the hospital paid thousands of dollars to insure the vehicle, according to hospital records and interviews. When the chief executive lost his license after an accident, hospital security guards chauffeured him and his wife around the clock in a Cadillac Escalade or a Lincoln Town Car.
The chief executive, Rajiv Garg, was not the only one who benefited from his ties with Wyckoff. One member of the hospital’s board obtained for the pharmacy that he owned the exclusive right to market prescription drugs to hospital patients. Another board member lent $2.4 million to the ailing Wyckoff at 12 percent interest, with the hospital required to put up several of its buildings as security.
Local politicians also joined in. Allies of United States Representative Edolphus Towns, Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez and Councilman Erik Martin Dilan have landed high-level positions at the hospital, despite questionable qualifications, further weakening its management. Mr. Dilan’s wife became the hospital’s director of public relations.
Pop Quiz!! How does the following Krugman column relate to healthcare?
Lobbyists, Guns and Money
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Florida’s now-infamous Stand Your Ground law, which lets you shoot someone you consider threatening without facing arrest, let alone prosecution, sounds crazy — and it is. And it’s tempting to dismiss this law as the work of ignorant yahoos. But similar laws have been pushed across the nation, not by ignorant yahoos but by big corporations.
Specifically, language virtually identical to Florida’s law is featured in a template supplied to legislators in other states by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-backed organization that has managed to keep a low profile even as it exerts vast influence (only recently, thanks to yeoman work by the Center for Media and Democracy, has a clear picture of ALEC’s activities emerged). And if there is any silver lining to Trayvon Martin’s killing, it is that it might finally place a spotlight on what ALEC is doing to our society — and our democracy.
What is ALEC? Despite claims that it’s nonpartisan, it’s very much a movement-conservative organization, funded by the usual suspects: the Kochs, Exxon Mobil, and so on. Unlike other such groups, however, it doesn’t just influence laws, it literally writes them, supplying fully drafted bills to state legislators. In Virginia, for example, more than 50 ALEC-written bills have been introduced, many almost word for word. And these bills often become law.
Supreme Court begins review of health-care law
By Robert Barnes and N.C. Aizenman,
The Supreme Court opened its historic review of the national health-care overhaul Monday with an indication that it will be able to decide the constitutional question of whether Congress exceeded its powers despite arguments that the challenge was brought too soon.The court began the first of three days of oral arguments on the 2010 law by examining a statute that keeps courts from hearing tax challenges before they go into effect. But the justices’ questions indicated skepticism that the penalties prescribed for those who do not buy health insurance by 2014 amount to taxes under the 1867 law forbidding tax challenges.
The court on Tuesday will hear arguments about the so-called “individual mandate” that is at the heart of the health-care law.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/supreme-court-begins-review-of-health-care-law/2012/03/26/gIQA5lk0bS_print.html
Obama’s ego trip
By Robert J. Samuelson,
As the Supreme Court hears arguments on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — Obamacare, as many call it — the justices will probably share at least one assumption: that their decision will have a big effect on the health of Americans. Ideally, everyone ought to have insurance, and it’s popular wisdom that this would significantly improve people’s health. But it’s not true. The ACA’s fate will dramatically affect government and the health-care system; the impact on Americans’ health will be far more modest.Rarely has a program with so little potential inspired so much contention. Although millions would benefit from health insurance, the overall relationship between people’s insurance status and their self-reported health is underwhelming. Consider a study of Massachusetts’s universal coverage program, enacted under former governor Mitt Romney, by economists Charles J. Courtemanche of the University of Louisville and Daniela Zapata of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. It estimated that about 1.4 percent of the state’s adult population moved into the “very good” or “excellent” health categories.
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