Did the door to compromise close for Catholic hospitals this week?
Even as the Obama administration attempts a delicate negotiation with Catholic hospitals and other religious-run institutions over the healthcare law's birth control mandate, speech after speech at the Democrats' nominating convention showed little interest in compromising on the issue.
“We ensured life-saving preventive care and the full range of reproductive services are now covered,” said Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) in her primetime convention speech in reference to the inclusion of birth control within preventive services that all insurance policies are required to cover.
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Do you catch more advocacy groups with honey than vinegar?
One House Republican is trying to win over a key supporter of the federal healthcare law.
The AARP's support of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was seen as a politically critical step in mollifying seniors' concerns about the legislation. Since the law's enactment, the group's support has served as a continuing bulwark against Republican charges that the law will undermine Medicare. And as Medicare has risen to prominence in the presidential campaign with the Republican vice presidential nomination of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the advocacy group for older Americans has again moved to political fore.
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Fifty shades of Medicare.
The addition of Paul Ryan to the Republican presidential ticket has led President Barack Obama to expand his Medicare focus on the stump. But his Medicare comments include an unexpected twist.
Conventional wisdom in Washington was that the selection of Ryan, chairman of the Budget Committee and author of two budget blueprints that would add an insurance subsidy component to Medicare, would open the Republican ticket to charges of trying to undermine Medicare. The healthcare program for seniors is traditionally a third-rail issue in Washington that politicians from both parties have studiously avoided. And now, Mitt Romney appeared to be following Ryan right onto the tracks.
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Four years ago, it was Gustav. Last year, it was Irene. This year, it’s Hurricane Isaac, which the Weather Channel reports is heading for the Caribbean and then the U.S.—just in time for the Republican National Convention that starts Monday in Tampa Bay, Fla.
The tropical storm is cause for concern, but not enough for James Davis, the Republican National Convention’s director of communications, to say if the RNC would shut down the four-day event. In a brief phone conversation today, Davis stayed on message.
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A week from today, the Republican National Committee will begin its four-day pep rally in Tampa, Fla. to nominate Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan as the GOP's candidates for president and vice president.
I'll be there with Gregg Blesch, Modern Healthcare's news editor, to bring you the week's healthcare-related news. Gregg will also join my colleague Rich Daly from Sept. 3-6 in Charlotte, N.C., to cover the Democratic National Convention.
This year, the GOP chose “A Better Future” as its theme, and the party is promoting a “Convention Without Walls” approach for the week, complete with mobile apps where users can receive live updates and video from the convention floor at the Tampa Bay Forum. Today the RNC released its schedule for the convention's first day, which will include remarks that night from House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), Republican Gov. Rick Scott of Florida, and former Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas. And when is the last time you heard anything about the Oak Ridge Boys? They'll be singing the National Anthem next Monday afternoon.
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The ever-growing shadow of the Nov. 6 presidential election officially reached HHS yesterday. In a call with reporters announcing what amounts to a nationwide campaign to get pharmacies to distribute pamphlets outlining new ACA-created Medicare benefits, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius took a little political detour.
Following a familiar litany of the various popular provisions of the 2010 healthcare overhaul, Sebelius launched into an aggressive attack on the Medicare changes included in the last two House-passed budgets and authored by newly named Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan.
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GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney's choice of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) as his running mate sent a clear signal that Medicare will be a major issue in this presidential election, and President Barack Obama's remarks Sunday indicate he got the message.
Ryan, the 42-year-old chairman of the powerful House Budget Committee, is the chief architect of a budget plan that made headlines in 2011 and 2012 for proposing a massive overhaul to the Medicare program. Any other choice for a vice president would not have nearly the same effect on healthcare policy issues as the Wisconsin Republican who recommends a premium support model—in which federal payments are made to health plans that consumers choose—to save the Medicare program. Ryan’s 2012 budget proposal differs from last year’s plan because it would give consumers a choice between premium support and the traditional Medicare program.
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Call it the awkward phase of the campaign.
This past week one of the most glaring examples of conflicts between core supporters of the President Barack Obama’s healthcare policies—feminists and religiously motivated social justice advocates—was on full display. As was his attempt to please both groups on opposite sides of a controversy spurred by his healthcare law that nearly all employers cover no-cost birth control.
It came this past Wednesday when Obama added a Catholic twist to his re-election campaign pitch for the healthcare overhaul that usually touts the birth control mandate as a standout component.
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It's like watching a trailer to a horror movie. You know something bad is going to happen. You just don't know when.
A law enacted this week requiring sequester details within 30 days is expected to give Medicare providers new insights—or more likely nightmares—on the looming 2% cut to their payments.
The Sequestration Transparency Act of 2012, sign by President Barack Obama on Tuesday, requires the administration to provide detailed estimates within 30 days of the sources for the cuts required to begin in January 2013 under the Budget Control Act of 2011. The law requires $1.2 trillion in government-wide federal cuts over10 years, while exempting certain programs.
The new law's required estimates, down to the “program, project, and activity level,” will include greater detail on the maximum 2% annual cut in Medicare provider payments required by the law, a congressional source confirmed this week.
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The usually apolitical artistic sequence featured in the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games turned some heads among Washington policy wonks, this year.
Julie Barnes, director of health policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, described some surprise about the sequence that lavished praise on the British National Health Service, during her opening remarks this week at a Washington health policy gathering on “Our Health Care Future: What's Next After the Supreme Court Decision?”
“It was a little surprising; a little different,” the former acting director of the health policy program at the liberal New America Foundation said.
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With the November congressional and presidential elections a little more than three months away, provider advocates have ramped up their campaign giving—with one notable exception.
Provider political action committees already have taken in and distributed millions of dollars to both incumbents and challengers, but the largest such provider group—run by the American Hospital Association—has spent less than half of the money it has collected from members in the current election cycle.
The AHA PAC collected $3,140,010 by the end of June but spent only $1,318,569, according to the political campaign contribution tracking site OpenSecrets.org.
The American Health Care Association PAC actually has spent more than AHA, even though it has collected only about half as much: $1,658,281.
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