Obama cites California to tout his healthcare law
President Obama pointed to California's progress in implementing the Affordable Care Act as he tries to get Americans on board with the healthcare law.
By Noam N. Levey and Christi ParsonsThis post has been updated, as indicated below.
3:00 AM PDT, June 7, 2013
[Updated, 10:56 a.m. June 7: SAN JOSE – President Obama on Friday morning held up California as an example of how his healthcare law will help consumers, citing the state’s progress getting health insurers to offer better plans at affordable prices.
“A lot of opponents of the Affordable Care Act … had all kinds of sky-is-falling, doom-and-gloom predictions that not only would the law fail, but what we would also see is costs would skyrocket,” the president told reporters at a stop in Silicon Valley. “It turns out that what we are seeing in the states that have committed themselves to implementing this law correctly, we’re seeing some good news.”
Obama also urged Californians and other Americans who don’t have health coverage to sign up this fall.
And he highlighted a multimillion-dollar partnership between the nonprofit California Endowment and major Spanish-language media outlets aimed at getting Latinos to enroll in health insurance next year. The Obama administration and other supporters of the law believe Latinos are crucial to the law’s success.]
The endowment, which has allocated $225 million to help implement the Affordable Care Act, plans to spend about $70 million for advertising, much of it in Spanish-language media, including Univision, Telemundo, La Opinion and Radio Bilingue.
The president's remarks come two weeks after state leaders announced lower-than-expected premiums that millions of Californians will face when a new state insurance marketplace opens this fall for those who don't get health benefits through their employer.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama-healthcare-20130607,0,2751455,print.story
State may fill gap in federal health care coverage
WASHINGTON — A congressional mistake that could cause nearly 4 million people to be ineligible for federal subsidies in President Obama’s health care law has prompted Massachusetts officials to launch a new effort to try to close the gap.
Under what has become known as a “glitch” in Obama’s health plan, eligibility for insurance subsidies will be based on how much it costs workers who buy an individual plan, not the far more expensive family plan. The glitch would affect uninsured spouses and an estimated 460,000 children of workers who cannot afford the family coverage offered through employers.
Although that was not what lawmakers say they intended, partisan congressional gridlock has closed off efforts to fix the glitch before the ambitious overhaul aimed at universal coverage kicks in fully next year.
So officials in Massachusetts, where the framework for the national law was first enacted, are stepping in, saying they want to fix the glitch to help those affected in the Bay State. Advocates say they hope Massachusetts’ efforts will focus new national attention on the problem.
Hundreds in government had advance word of Medicare action at heart of trading-spike probe
By Tom Hamburger and Dina ElBoghdady,
Hundreds of federal employees were given advance word of a Medicare decision worth billions of dollars to private insurers in the weeks before the official announcement, a period when trading in the shares of those firms spiked.The surge of trading in Humana’s and other private health insurers’ stock before the April 1 announcement already has prompted the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate whether Wall Street investors had advance access to inside information about the then-confidential Medicare funding plan.
Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) told The Washington Post late last week that his office reviewed the e-mail records of employees at the Department of Health and Human Services and found that 436 of them had early access to the Medicare decision as much as two weeks before it was made public.
The number of federal employees with advance knowledge is surely higher; the figures Grassley’s staff compiled did not include people at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget who also saw the information. The e-mail records of those employees have not been made available to Grassley.
The discovery that sensitive information was so widely disseminated could complicate the forensic task for investigators trying to determine who may have leaked confidential information, and it brings further attention to the government’s handling of policy details valued by Wall Street traders.
“This should sound an alarm,” Grassley said. “It should result in better controls to avoid unfair access to information that the average investor could never tap.”
Tracing leaks of confidential financial information can be especially challenging in official Washington, where Congress and the executive branch — along with the reporters and lobbyists who track them — are accustomed to a relatively unfettered exchange of information, compared with the more regulated environment on Wall Street.
The potential sensitivity of such exchanges was brought home for Grassley last month, when the Justice Department hand-delivered to his office a letter asking for details about a staff member’s communications with a former staffer. That former Grassley staffer was a lobbyist who occasionally worked in the burgeoning field of “political intelligence,” which specializes in providing government information to investors for a fee.
Grassley has led calls in the Senate for more scrutiny of that field, and he has said he plans to introduce legislation that would require political-intelligence consultants to disclose their activities, as lobbyists are required to do.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hundreds-in-government-had-advance-word-of-medicare-action-at-heart-of-trading-spike-probe/2013/06/09/044944d0-cec7-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_print.html
Rethinking the Twice-Yearly Dentist Visit
By CATHERINE SAINT LOUIS
For decades, dentists have urged all adults to schedule preventive visits every six months. But a new study finds that annual cleanings may be adequate for adults without certain risk factors for periodontal disease while people with a high risk may need to go more often.
Almost half of adults age 30 and older, about 65 million, have a form of chronic inflammatory gum disease that can ultimately lead to tooth loss. The new study, published Monday in The Journal of Dental Research, suggests that the frequency of dental visits for cleanings and other preventive services should be tailored to each person’s risk factors for periodontal disease.“The findings suggest that for low-risk patients, a yearly prophylactic visit does prevent tooth loss over a protracted period of 16 years, and there’s no significant difference in an added visit,” said Dr. Robert J. Genco, a periodontist and SUNY distinguished professor of oral biology at the University at Buffalo, who was not involved in the study. “They found if you had more than one risk factor, that maybe two visits isn’t optimal.”
Prevention reduces tooth loss, but there has been little evidence to support a twice-yearly visit to the dentist for everyone. The new study looked at insurance claims data for 5,117 adults, primarily in Michigan, to determine whether tooth extraction was linked to a previous history of one or two dental visits a year in patients with varying risks for periodontal disease. The subjects were classified as high risk if they smoked or had diabetes or certain variations in the interleukin-1 gene, which some studies have suggested may be linked to periodontal disease in white people. Subjects were deemed low risk if they had none of these risks.
Researchers found no statistical difference in tooth loss among low-risk patients whether they went for a checkup once or twice a year. But in the high-risk camp, roughly 17 percent of patients who had had biannual visits had a tooth extracted, compared with roughly 22 percent of those who had had just one visit a year.
The researchers said that even two visits a year might not suffice to reduce tooth loss in patients with multiple risk factors.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/10/rethinking-the-twice-yearly-dentist-visit/?pagewanted=print
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