medicaid

Nine months ago, Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill were all celebration as they hailed the renewal of the program. Last week, they called for its demise.

The Washington Post points out today that, by divorcing public plan rates from Medicare in their final health reform bill, House Democrats might have to hike Medicaid eligibility to 150 percent of poverty as a compensation measure.
The shuffle looks fine on paper. After all, coverage is coverage, right?
Actually, no.

The Congressional Budget Office last week made a bit of news when it released cost estimates on two different health reform packages being considered by House Democrats, who are trying to bring the cost of their legislation down below $900 billion over 10 years. But, as The Washington Post pointed out, the cheaper version [...]

The Democrats’ plans to overhaul the nation’s dysfunctional health care system took a giant step forward Tuesday when the Senate Finance Committee passed a $829 billion proposal designed to expand coverage to millions of uninsured Americans while reining in runaway health care costs.
The vote was 14 to 9, with Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) the only [...]

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne today joins the ranks of those predicting that, a year from now, the health care debate will be a distant memory, lost in the raging political scuffle over who’s to blame for rampant unemployment.
While official Washington and much of the media focus on the great health-care struggle, the administration’s economic [...]

One of the central elements of the Democrats’ plans to cover the tens of millions of uninsured Americans is a sweeping expansion of Medicaid, the state-federal partnership to cover the lowest-income folks. But the success of that strategy is in doubt for a couple of reasons.
First, Medicaid pays providers at such low rates (roughly 72 [...]

With so much speculation on whether Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) will support the health reform bill finalized by the Senate Finance Committee last week, the world might be surprised to learn that some panel Democrats are also wary of the legislation. Yet Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) have both “refused to pledge [...]

A little after midnight, nearing the end of yesterday’s marathon health reform debate in the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) had the stage, and the audience fell strangely silent. Rockefeller talked about his experiences as a VISTA volunteer in Appalachia decades ago; he talked about the destitution and absence of health care in [...]

Deep into the Senate Finance Committee’s marathon debate over health care reform, Democrats Thursday night killed a GOP proposal that would have forced legal immigrants to wait five years before getting federal subsidies on the proposed state insurance exchanges.
Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), sponsor of the amendment, said it would simply align exchange policies with those [...]

In a perfect display of how much of the Senate Finance Committee’s public debate over health reform is really not public, the panel this afternoon approved — without discussion and without a roll-call vote — a controversial amendment granting states the flexibility to drop some Medicaid patients after 2010.