When Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, told HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that he worried Obamacare’s implementation was headed for a “train wreck,” she publicly promised to bring him into the loop.
Turns out that Sebelius kept her word and has been giving Baucus one-on-one briefings on the law’s implementation every other week since his very public April 17 complaint about a lack of information. (Her staff promised synchronized press briefings implementation and has since declined to provide those.) The White House also has chipped in, sending Chief of Staff Denis McDonough to brief Baucus on the healthcare overhaul’s implementation (along with other issues) on alternating weeks from Sebelius’ briefings, according to his staff.
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The CMS has a growing health insurance exchange problem.
The authors of the 2010 federal healthcare overhaul never intended the federal government to operate most health insurance exchanges. But as the nation gears up for an expected 7 million new beneficiaries to make use of exchanges — about 85% of whom will require complex subsidies — 26 states have left their operations to the federal government.
And it’s beginning to look like the number of states hankering for a federal takeover could grow. A number of state-led exchanges are way behind schedule.
Are the feds up to the task, given that running something for more than half the country is a lot more complex than launching any one state exchange? Experts say local insurance market variations will stop the federal exchange builders from using cookie cutter economies of scale.
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The administration has shrugged off attacks for its delays on issuing Obamacare regulations. But you'd think they would have been more timely on the Basic Health Program regs, whose postponed implementation will have a major impact on the law's coverage expansion.
The BHP was designed to provide coverage assistance program for people with incomes too high for Medicaid but who cannot afford exchange coverage, even with subsidies. An HHS guidance document released this week put off proposed rules until sometime later this year and implementation of the program until 2015. That's a year later than originally planned.
The delay will hit coverage expansion for people the law was supposed to benefit the most: the low-to-moderate income uninsured.
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The charge that AARP's lobbying is driven primarily by the profits it derives from its Medigap insurance plans, which supplement standard Medicare coverage, has been a staple of congressional Republicans since the seniors group threw its considerable weight behind passage of Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
Now some high-ranking Democrats are joining in the attack. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) blasted the powerful seniors' group Tuesday for basing its Washington lobbying priorities on its financial profits. The chairman of the Finance Committee's Health Subcommittee accused the 20-million strong seniors group of failing to back congressional Democrats' efforts to block Medicaid changes as part of a major year-end debt deal.
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One of the casualties from last week's congressional elections is a familiar face in the healthcare industry: Rep. Pete Stark, the California Democrat who currently serves as the Ways and Means Health Subcommittee's ranking member and is widely known for the three-part physician self-referral law that bears his name.
A longtime champion of a single-payer healthcare system, Stark—who has served in the U.S. House of Representatives in the 8th, 9th and currently 13th district of California since 1973—was beaten by Eric Swalwell, a fellow Democrat, to represent the Golden State's 15th district. In the healthcare industry, Stark's influence largely stems from his work drafting legislation that governs physician self-referral in the Medicare and Medicaid programs. The first phase prohibited physician self-referral for clinical lab services in Medicare starting in 1992, and additional phases became effective in 1994 and 2007, as the law eventually expanded to other healthcare services and also applied to Medicaid.
From 2007 to 2010, Stark served as the subcommittee's chairman. His departure now leaves open the health subcommittee ranking-member spot on the hugely influential panel that makes tax law.
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Affordable health insurance is part of the “middle-class bargain” that President Barack Obama is promising all Americans if he's elected to another term on Nov. 6.
That message was included in The New Economic Patriotism: A Plan for Jobs & Middle-Class Security (PDF), a 20-page booklet of second-term plans that the president's campaign released Tuesday along with a new video ad. Pledging to build an “economy from the middle class out,” the agenda offers the president's objectives for American manufacturing, small business, education, healthcare, retirement security and the deficit. Not surprisingly, the section on healthcare touts the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and how the administration would ensure the controversial law's continued implementation in a second term.
“It is up to you whether we go back to a healthcare system that lets insurance companies decide who to cover, when to cover it, whether they can drop you from your coverage whenever you need it most, or whether we keep moving forward with a law that is already cutting costs and covering more people and saving lives,” the president says in it.
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A new study from the left-leaning Urban Institute says the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act relies on market-based principles to achieve its goals, which opponents of the law say they find puzzling.
Released Friday, the brief report from authors Randall Bovbjerg and Stan Dorn (PDF) starts with the premise that although critics of the 2010 law refer to it as a government takeover of the U.S. healthcare system, it is actually based on pro-competitive reforms reminiscent of the Reagan era.
“The argument that the ACA is market-based when the opponents say the market can't address healthcare is perplexing,” says Sean Riley, director of the health and human services task force at the American Legislative Exchange Council, a not-for-profit organization in Washington centered on free-enterprise principles and federalism at the state level.
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Just as truth is the first casualty of war, policy nuance dies quickly in political combat.
The latest example of that was seen in the healthcare firefight over emergency department use and the Massachusetts healthcare overhaul.
Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney got things started when he was asked in a Sept. 23 “60 Minutes” interview about any government responsibility to provide healthcare. Romney responded that “different states have different ways of doing that,” including care through clinics, emergency departments and “a solution that worked for my state.”
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Cue the ominous legislation soundtrack.
Congressional Democrats welcomed Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan back to Capitol Hill through a day-long series of attacks on his plan to repeal the healthcare overhaul and add an insurance subsidy option to Medicare.
Like other Democrats, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) took to the Senate floor to blast the Romney-Ryan campaign's healthcare plans that echo many of the provisions included in budgets Ryan authored as chairman of the Budget Committee.
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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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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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