Free Republic

Must see!! The crowd response when the Lib tried to blame Bush for the economy is priceless!!

New Deal on Medicare by: Bethany Stotts, October 06, 2008 The New Deal policies of Medicare and Social Security started out as small programs in the Thirties, but this year’s Medicare expenditures will total about $391 billion. The Medicare Trustees have issued a “funding warning” for the program in their last two annual reports. According to the Medicare Trustees 2008 statement, “Underlying health care costs per enrollee are projected to rise faster than the wages per worker on which payroll taxes and Social Security benefits are based. As a result, while Medicare’s annual costs were 3.2 percent of GDP in...

John McCain would pay for his health plan with major reductions to Medicare and Medicaid, a top aide said, in a move that independent analysts estimate could result in cuts of $1.3 trillion over 10 years to the government programs. The Republican presidential nominee has said little about the proposed cuts, but they are needed to keep his health-care plan "budget neutral," as he has promised. The McCain campaign hasn't given a specific figure for the cuts, but didn't dispute the analysts' estimate. In the months since Sen. McCain introduced his health plan, statements made by his campaign have implied...

Think $700 billion to bail out Wall Street is expensive? Just wait. The mortgage meltdown is cheap compared with the coming fiscal firestorm fanned by unfunded Social Security and Medicare costs. Together, these programs hold unfunded obligations totaling $41 trillion - 60 times larger than the proposed Wall Street bailout. And even this understates the difference, because $41 trillion is the current net value of the unfunded obligations over 75 years. The actual cumulative yearly deficits these programs face over the next 75 years are several magnitudes larger than $41 trillion. [Snip] The entitlement problem is simple to understand. In...

ORANGE – UCI Medical Center could lose Medicare funding after investigators found that anesthesiologists falsified surgical records, filling them out before patients were ever put under on the operating table. Inspectors found serious deficiencies that "substantially limit the hospital's capacity to render adequate care to patients," according to the certified letter and report sent Aug. 15 to the hospital's administrator. The Register obtained a copy of the public record from Medicare officials after UCI failed to respond to a Sept. 12 request for the report and accompanying information. UCI officials sent the Register an e-mail today – after learning of...

The government paid more than $1 billion in questionable Medicare claims for medical supplies that showed little relation to a patient's condition, including blood glucose strips for sexual impotence and special diabetic shoes for leg amputees, congressional investigators say. Billions more in taxpayer dollars may have been wasted over the last decade because the government-run health program for the elderly and disabled paid out claims with blank or invalid diagnosis codes, such as a "?" or "zzzzz." Medicare officials say even smiley-face icons could have been accepted. The report by Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security investigations subcommittee, obtained by...

In Sickness and In Health by: Malcolm A. Kline, September 23, 2008 Critics in both the media and academia who point to exploding costs and denial of care as maladies afflicting the U. S. health care system are getting part of the story right. “In the last seven years, we’ve had over [a] 100 percent increase in insurance premiums and only a 27 percent increase in earnings,” University of Utah economist Norman J. Waitzman said in a roundtable sponsored by Continuum, the university’s magazine. Waitzman is co-director of the Behavioral Science and Health program at the University. Unfortunately, too many...

STATEMENT OF GOVERNOR HALEY BARBOUR “On Friday the Division of Medicaid (DOM) received verification of a major financial issue it has been discussing with the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services........ In October 2003, the Musgrove Administration adjusted the State’s formula for paying the state share of Medicare Part B premiums......... ---snip As a result CMS.....is giving us a refund. Today, CMS refunded approximately $58.9 million to the State, which reduces the Medicaid deficit for FY09 by a like amount. A partial refund of $33.2 million was made by CMS on August 20th and used to repay a FY08 line...

Owners of All-Med Billing Corp., the couple submitted a whopping $420 million in false Medicare claims on behalf of 85 medical equipment companies in South Florida. They collected a 5 percent commission on $148.5 million paid to those businesses by Medicare between 1998 and 2004.

So government auditors have uncovered evidence of fraud in Medicare. Or rather, more fraud. The politicos lingering around Washington can barely keep a straight face as they claim to be shocked. A draft report by the inspector general of Health and Human Services -- circulating on Capitol Hill and leaked this week -- determines that Medicare may have paid $2.8 billion in improper or fake claims for medical equipment in 2006. That's an error rate of 31.5%, in a single corner of this colossal entitlement. "This report doesn't surprise me," fumed Democrat Pete Stark. Glad to hear the Congressman is...

Every August, the Census Bureau's release of the latest income and health insurance figures results in a political uproar, but this year the political class seems almost embarrassed by the good news. Median household income rose slightly in 2007, the poverty rate held steady and the number of uninsured even dropped slightly. Even so, a closer inspection of the numbers shows some dark clouds around the silver lining -- though not of the sort that those warning of another Great Depression usually find. Begin with health insurance coverage. Census found that 45.7 million people, or 15.3% of the population, were...

Professor Hubbard explains that Obama's claim that he will increase the payroll tax by only 4% cannot be correct. This amount will not generate the revenue necessary to maintain even current levels of entitlement spending: "The new payroll tax hike is more modest than the one Mr. Obama hinted at last fall, which might have uncapped the payroll tax entirely. But it would also do very little to shore up Social Security, since it means that no more than 15% of Social Security's long-term funding gap would be closed. Thus, if Mr. Obama is indeed opposed to reductions in Social...

Given the hearty support Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama received in Europe last month, he must have noticed the surprise and skepticism among some Germans when he asked that Europeans contribute more for defense. Many Europeans argue they cannot afford such an additional expenditure. They are right. And therein lies a cautionary tale for the United States, because continental Europe has been following something like Mr. Obama's plans for spending and taxes. Mr. Obama has revealed his plans in stages. First, on his campaign Web site, he indicated he would solve the long-run solvency of Social Security (a good thing)....

A federal judge has ordered a temporary halt in the state's 10 percent cut in Medi-Cal reimbursement rates, improving access to care for 6.5 million low-income patients but throwing a new wrench in already difficult state budget negotiations. The U.S. District Court decision forces the state to reimburse most Medi-Cal providers at rates prior to the 10 percent cut, which lawmakers and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made effective July 1 as a cost-cutting measure to help resolve a $15.2 billion budget shortfall this year. The move effects reimbursement rates the state pays to doctors, dentists, pharmacists, adult day-care centers and other...

An investigation into what the authorities say was a scheme that used homeless people to bilk tens of millions of dollars from federal and state health insurance programs began four years ago with a tip from a rescue mission employee. The employee, Scott Johnson, who works for the Union Rescue Mission in the heart of Skid Row, said he had noticed vans and cars loading up homeless people. “Sometimes they were so full of people that they put people in the trunks of cars,” Mr. Johnson said Thursday as he passed out bottles of water to the homeless. “I wondered...

Entitlements: The day of reckoning is coming for the costs we're running up to keep Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits flowing. Judgment will be painful — as in a 150% increase in our current tax bills.In an analysis prepared for Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, the Congressional Budget Office outlined the ghastly details: "The tax rate for the lowest tax bracket," the CBO told Ryan, "would have to be increased from 10% to 25% (or 150%), the tax rate on incomes in the current 25% bracket would have to be increased to 63% (or 152%); and the tax rate of...

LOS ANGELES, (AP) -- Authorities say FBI agents have served search warrants at three hospitals and arrested two men in a scheme to recruit homeless people to fraudulently bill government health care programs for millions of dollars in unnecessary health services. Federal authorities say the searches Wednesday were conducted at City of Angels, Tustin Hospital and Medical Center and Metropolitan Hospital.

Peter Orszag is no conservative ideologue. The head of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) was a scholar at the liberal Brookings Institution before being picked for his current position by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Yet, Mr. Orszag recently warned that the rising cost of federal entitlement programs, particularly Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, poses a grave threat to America's economic future. According to Mr. Orszag, without dramatic reform, the cost of those three programs alone will rise from 18 percent of GDP today to 28 percent by the middle of this century and as much as 35 percent soon...

Passed in December 2003 and operational in January of 2006, Medicare Part D subsidizes prescription drugs for the elderly in the United States by contracting with private plans to provide drug coverage. Part D enrollment is voluntary. The government pays each plan a lump sum for each enrollee that chooses it, and the private plans, not the government, negotiate drug prices. In The Effect of Medicare Part D on Pharmaceutical Prices and Utilization (NBER Working Paper No. 13917), co-authors Mark Duggan and Fiona Scott Morton review Part D's performance in its first year and estimate that a branded drug sold...

This is an incredible read. Please go to link to see the massive fraud going on in South Florida.

Medicare pays doctors for specific services. If a patient has a checkup that includes an X-ray, a urine analysis and a physical, Medicare pays the doctor three separate fees. Each fee is meant to reimburse the doctor for the time and skill he or she devotes to the patient. But it is also supposed to pay for overhead, and this is where the problem begins. To Medicare, a doctor’s overhead (or “practice expense”) includes such items as rent, staff salaries and the cost of high-tech medical equipment. When the agency pays a fee to a doctor who has performed a...

When Hazel Homer was 99, more than one doctor advised that there was little to be done about her failing heart except wait for it to fail a final time. But Mrs. Homer was not interested in waiting to die of what many would call old age. Now, at 104, her heart is still ticking, thanks to a specialized pacemaker and defibrillator that synchronizes her heartbeat and can administer a slight shock to revive her if her heart falters. Her operation, a month before her 100th birthday, reflects what some doctors are hailing as a new frontier in medicine: successful...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday voted to override President George W. Bush's veto of a Medicare bill that would cancel a scheduled 11 percent pay cut to doctors who treat patients in the health care program for the elderly. The House voted 383-41 to overturn Bush's action, just hours after he vetoed the legislation. The Senate also was expected to override the veto later on Tuesday.

This week Congress will demonstrate if it is serious or not about reining in entitlement spending, says Michael O. Leavitt, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHS). Right now Medicare is paying insane rental prices for Durable Medical Equipment (DME) -- prices far higher than it would cost to purchase the equipment outright. DME prices are based on a fee-schedule established by law in the 1980s, not on competitive market prices. This is a price-fixing program, says Leavitt, and the equipment suppliers like it because they get overpaid and don't have to compete. For example: An oxygen...

The Senate has passed an 18-month Medicare physician payment bill that negates steep reductions in the Medicare physician payment rate for the remainder of this year and next year. The legislation now will go to President Bush."H.R. 6331" in the search box after selecting "Bill Number") maintains current Medicare payment levels for the rest of 2008 and provides a 1.1 percent increase in the Medicare payment rate in 2009, thus negating a 10.6 percent payment reduction that took effect on July 1 and an additional 5.4 percent reduction that was scheduled to take place in 2009. Bush has threatened to...

On the Spot (CNSNews.com) - Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) told Cybercast News Service on Tuesday that they would support raising taxes to pay the $36.3 trillion needed to pay for promised Medicare benefits over the next 75 years. Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), however, told Cybercast News Service that he thinks the level of health care provided to Americans through Medicare can be improved without raising taxes. “We are going to have to pay for it, and there is no question that raising taxes is certainly one way,” Rockefeller said. “There is no way, if we continue...

Posted: 07/09/08 04:13 PM [ET] Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) returned to the Senate Wednesday to cast the decisive vote on stalled Medicare legislation, making his first appearance in the chamber since he was diagnosed two months ago with brain cancer. The 76-year-old senator entered the Senate through the first-floor entrance. The longtime chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee underwent successful brain surgery at Duke University Medical Center on June 2 and has been undergoing cancer treatments in Massachusetts for the tumor. Kennedy was greeted on the Senate floor by a long, sustained burst of applause from other...

Plummeting Reimbursement Rates Have Some Doctors Looking for a Way Out By AUDREY GRAYSON ABC News Medical Unit RSS For the past four years, Dr. Heather Tipsword has owned a family practice clinic that primarily treats Medicaid and Medicare patients in Oklahoma City. As many of her friends and family were looking forward to Fourth of July celebrations this past weekend, Tipsword was anxiously looking forward to another event altogether: Congress' meeting on the Monday after the holiday weekend to discuss some kind of fix to the scheduled 10.6 percent Medicare reimbursement cut. For many doctors, low Medicare and Medicaid...

There was a remarkable exchange on the floor of the Senate this past Thursday between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. It offers pretty stunning evidence of how personally petty Reid is, as well as his penchant for defining “partisanship� as anything that keeps him from getting his way. The particulars here aren’t terribly important, but what happened was this: The Senate was voting on a Medicare bill bloated with new spending. The bill was also an attempt to prevent cuts in payment rates to doctors who treat seniors on Medicare, and Democrats wanted to...

As of June 25, 2008 report from SEC, www.SEC.gov/news/speech/2008/spch062508cc_annuity.htm "…Equity indexed annuities [fixed index annuities] are investments that insurance companies sell to the public. They were first introduced about 13 years ago, around 1995. They gained ground and grew significantly over the years — in 2004 alone, for example, sales of equity indexed annuities increased over 50 percent, from $14 billion in 2003 to about $22 billion in 2004. In 2007, indexed annuity sales were nearly $25 billion. Today, over $123 billion is invested in indexed annuities…. Today, in 2008, the cause for concern seems greater than ever. Recently, Dateline...

A group of cardiologists recently had a proposition for Dr. Andrew Rosenblatt, who runs a busy heart clinic in San Francisco: Would he join them in buying a CT scanner, a $1 million machine that produces detailed images of the heart? The scanner would give Dr. Rosenblatt a new way to look inside patients’ arteries, enable his clinic to market itself as having the latest medical technology and provide extra revenue. Although tempted, Dr. Rosenblatt was reluctant. CT scans, which are typically billed at $500 to $1,500, have never been proved in large medical studies to be better than older...

We constantly hear about the cost of earmarks and the Iraq War, but we hear nothing about "entitlements" -- the government's ironic term for programs that transfer money from people who earned it to people who didn't. Today's big problem with entitlements is that their growth will soon eat everything in the federal budget, says 20/20 host John Stossel. Last month, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analyzed the growth of government spending and deficits for Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), ranking member of the House Budget Committee. According to the CBO report: Spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, which in...

In a surprise development, the House on Tuesday passed a Medicare bill with a veto-proof majority, marking a significant step toward a goal that has eluded Congress all year. The measure passed on a 355-59 vote, with 129 Republicans joining all Democrats who voted to approve the bill. Several members of the GOP leadership cast votes for the legislation. The Democratic leadership set a high bar for passage by placing the measure on the suspension calendar, where it needed a two-thirds majority. As time ran out on the vote and it became clear it had reached that mark, at least...

MIAMI -- All it took to bilk the federal government out of $105 million was a laptop computer. From her Mediterranean-style townhouse, a high school dropout named Rita Campos Ramirez orchestrated what prosecutors call the largest health-care fraud by one person. Over nearly four years, she electronically submitted more than 140,000 Medicare claims for unnecessary equipment and services. She used the proceeds to finance big-ticket purchases, including two condominiums and a Mercedes-Benz... The South Florida region bills Medicare more than $2 billion each year for injectable HIV medications. That figure is 22 times as high as the amount of similar...

Congress is spending us into a hole. We hear about the cost of earmarks and the Iraq war. But what about "entitlements"? That's the government's ironic term for programs that transfer money from people who earned it to people who didn't. Entitlement? How can you be entitled to someone else's money? To finance "entitlement" programs, the government threatens force against the taxpayers who provide the money. Why are people who favor compulsion called humanitarians, while those who favor freedom are stigmatized as greedy? But I digress. Today's big problem with entitlements is that their growth will soon eat everything in...

Race and place of residence can have a staggering impact on the course and quality of the medical treatment a patient receives, according to new research showing that blacks with diabetes or vascular disease are nearly five times more likely than whites to have a leg amputated and that women in Mississippi are far less likely to have mammograms than those in Maine. The study, by researchers at Dartmouth, examined Medicare claims for evidence of racial and geographic disparities and found that on a variety of quality indices, blacks typically were less likely to receive recommended care than whites within...

HMOs Deconstructed by: Malcolm A. Kline, May 23, 2008 Government-run Medicare health coverage for the elderly is more efficient than private sector fee-for-service treatments, Hugh Waters of Johns Hopkins University argued earlier this month in a seminar held by the libertarian Cato Institute. “Medicare has lower administrative costs,” Waters told the audience at the symposium on Capitol Hill. He tallies the overhead at $127 per Medicare enrollee in 2003 compared to $421 per capita for the private sector equivalent. Additionally, Waters asserts, “Medicare has slower increases in costs.” Between 1970 and 2004, he estimates, costs went up 10.9 percent in...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Medicare is lurching toward disaster and it is too late for the Bush Administration and Congress to do anything about it, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt said on Tuesday. He said the next administration will have to act to stop rising costs and get control of the $400 billion federal health insurance plan for the elderly, which now covers 44 million people. "Higher and higher costs are being borne by fewer and fewer people. Sooner or later, this formula implodes," Leavitt said in a speech to the right-leaning Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute...

Sen. John McCain today will call for partially rolling back President Bush's Medicare prescription drug program and for a freeze on discretionary spending in order to get the federal budget in better shape, his advisers said yesterday evening. Mr. McCain, who voted against the Medicare drug program in 2003, would make wealthier seniors pay more to remain in the drug program, just as they do for some other parts of Medicare coverage. His advisers said Mr. Bush's program ended up covering people who are capable of paying their own way. "That reform alone saves billions of dollars that can be...

If I told you how you could save $122,000, would you be interested? Your government-run health care system, under the Medicare program, is willing to spend $126,000 to care for a patient in a nursing home for six weeks while she receives infusion therapy for treatment of bacterial endocarditis. Yet this same government-run health care system will not pay the $4,000 medical bill if this same patient chooses to stay in her home and undergo the same medical procedure at home. That’s right. Medicare will pay $126,000 for her to go into a nursing home for the treatment, but will...

The former comptroller general of the United States, David Walker, said in a recent interview that the unfunded liability for Social Security and Medicare was $20 trillion in 1990. The Social Security and Medicare trustees issued their annual report last week indicating that the unfunded liability for those two programs is now $53 trillion. Congress has done absolutely nothing to curtail this national financial tidal wave. For decades, some members have talked – only talked – about the problem. But all of them have allowed the unfunded liabilities to explode, and the national debt to grow to almost $10 trillion....

When I hear my fellow baby boomers gleefully talk about their elaborate plans to retire ASAP, head for the Tuscan hills, or otherwise continue their lifelong quest for "self-actualization," I have to bite my tongue. It's not that I'm all work and no play. But there's just something - make that lots of things - wrong, in general, with retiring at 55, 62 or even 65. I would go so far as to call it profoundly selfish and unpatriotic. However, if Americans retired later, either staying in their current jobs or taking up "encore careers" - what Marc Freedman of...

WASHINGTON - Trustees for the government's two biggest benefit programs warned Tuesday that Social Security and Medicare are facing "enormous challenges," with the threat to Medicare's solvency far more severe. ADVERTISEMENT The trustees, issuing a once-a-year analysis of the government's two biggest benefit programs, said the resources in the Social Security trust fund will be depleted by 2041. The reserves in the Medicare trust fund that pays hospital benefits were projected to be wiped out by 2019. Both those dates were the same as in last year's report. But the trustees warned that financial pressures will begin much sooner when...

The Supreme Court on Monday let stand a federal policy that allows employers to reduce their health insurance expenses for retired workers once they turn 65 and qualify for Medicare. The justices turned down an appeal by the 39-million-member AARP to undo a rule that essentially allows employers to treat retirees differently depending on their age. The rules were put into place by the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, with the support of labor unions and other groups. They worried that employers would greatly reduce or eliminate health benefits for millions of retirees if they could not take Medicare into...

You know about taxes. You experience the seemingly endless bite from your paycheck for federal, state, and sometimes local income taxes. You see the chunk of your wages that go to Social Security and Medicare. You write checks for property taxes, and you pay sales tax on virtually every purchase you make. You know the reality (and, to be fair, the necessity) of taxes, but does your teenager? Kids pay sales tax, of course. Teens who work part-time or at summer jobs often experience their first taste of taxes when they see their first paycheck and learn the true meaning...

MEDINA NY: Doctor’s office searched Hassan Medical targeted by State Attorney General’s office By NICOLE COLEMAN Investigators with the New York State Attorney General’s Office raided a Gwinn Street family physician’s office during patient visiting hours Friday. Wearing official jackets and golden badges, they arrived in multiple SUV trucks at Hassan Medical Group PLLC, 1038 Gwinn St., Medina sometime Friday morning. At least five State Attorney General officials remained at the office throughout the day probing the employees with questions and apparently looking through records. None were able to confirm the reason for their presence or whether they were sent...

Medicare and Medicaid cost $627 billion last year - almost a quarter of all federal spending. That amount is expected to double within 10 years as baby boomers overwhelm the Medicare program. Yet you won't hear much on this subject from Sens. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain. They fear discussing it because all the conventional choices for reining in the cost of these programs are unpleasant. They include limiting care, raising taxes, reducing payments to providers and asking wealthier beneficiaries to pay more. The Congressional Budget Office attributes much of the rise in costs to beneficial but expensive...

Follow the logic: 1.) Government routes funds -> subsidy to cover some of the bill -> Insurance industry gets a dramatic influx of income -> most influential lobbyists get the exclusive subsidy contracts -> unfair competition and antitrust complaints -> legal framework gets delayed 2.) Unions lose bargaining power as they no longer have the required negotiation of health insurance for workers -> kicking unions in the mouth even more in the face of an already unregulated globalized workforce -> unemployment 3.) No requirement to insure workers -> less workers for same productivity due to weakening Unions -> corporations get...

On July 27, 2007, 28 executives of the Thousand Oaks, Calif., pharmaceutical firm Amgen contributed more than $20,000 to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-Calif.) campaign. On Aug. 2, Pelosi (D-Calif.) reintroduced the Early Treatment for HIV Act, a bill that could boost Medicaid coverage of HIV-related drugs, including Procrit, which is manufactured by Amgen and marketed by a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, a firm in which Pelosi's husband owns at least $250,000 in stock, according to Pelosi's disclosure forms. Specifically, the legislation would give states the option to allow patients who are HIV-positive, but do not have AIDS, to...

Medicare is poised to wreak havoc on the economy. And our presidential candidates are avoiding the issue. Twice I have asked Alan Greenspan what he considers the greatest threat to the U.S. economy, and both times he has answered immediately with a single word: Medicare. He isn't so worried about the trade deficit and the housing crash; he figures market forces will sort them out. But Medicare is something else - a multitrillion-dollar problem that's about to get dramatically worse, and one that nobody wants to talk about. You'd think that the greatest threat to America's economy would be Topic...