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Romney Calls For Raising Medicare Age Gradually To 67

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 13:47 GMT

The candidate detailed some of his Medicare plan in front of a crowd of about 1200 people on Friday in Michigan.

Romney Offers Medicare Plan

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 18:31 GMT

The presidential hopeful unveiled a plan to increase the Medicare eligibility age and laid out a time line under which the government would offer a new private option for care.

Medicaid Cuts Rile Doctors

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 15:05 GMT

A plan by Washington state's Medicaid agency to stop paying for certain emergency-room visits is prompting pushback from hospitals and doctors, who say they will be stuck with unpaid bills.

The Candidates offer up a budget fantasyland

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 10:39 GMT

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?”
- Alice, from Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass, 1865

Alice could have been talking about the budget fantasyland conjured up by the 2012 presidential candidates.

Recall that in his Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union address, Governor Mitch Daniels (R-IN) promised that if the GOP prevails in the election, 2012 will be “the year we strike out boldly not merely to avert national bankruptcy but to say to a new generation that America is still the world's premier land of opportunity.”

So you might assume then that the Republican presidential candidates have plans to reduce the debt, right?

You might, but you would be wrong.

“The national debt would balloon under tax policies championed by three of the four major Republican candidates for president,” according to an independent study by the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), reported in yesterday’s Washington Post. Former Pennsylvania Senator Santorum would add $4.5 trillion and former House speaker Newt Gingrich would add $7 trillion to the debt by 2021, “pushing the portion of the debt held by outside investors to well over 100 percent of the overall economy,” writes the Post.

The only Republican with a plan to lower the debt is Congressman Ron Paul, who proposes even bigger cuts in government programs than the revenue that would be lost from lower taxes, bringing down the debt by $2 trillion over the next decade. But Paul assumes a wholesale dismantling of most federal agencies and an end to entitlements—cuts that are not likely to be accepted by a majority of voters or ever be enacted by Congress.

The fact that three of the four GOP candidates would add trillions to the debt doesn’t let President Obama off the hook. In a separate analysis, CRFB finds that the under the President’s proposed FY 2013 budget request, “deficits would total $6.7 trillion (3.3 percent of GDP), with debt reaching $19.5 trillion (76 percent of GDP)” by 2022.

This, from a president who said that “if we don’t act, the growing debt will eventually crowd out everything else, preventing us from investing in things like education, or sustaining programs like Medicare.”

To recap, this is the year when:

the country will elect a new President from a Republican party that promises to “avert national bankruptcy”

or

we will re-elect a President from the Democratic party who said “if we don’t act, the growing debt will eventually crowd out everything else”

and this is how much more their tax and spending plans would add to the public debt:

Santorum: +$4.5 trillion

Obama: +$6.7 trillion

Gingrich: +$7 trillion

“If [they] had a world of [their] own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?

Today’s question: Will the voters see through the candidate’s budget fantasyland and demand real answers on taxes and spending?

National Briefing | Health: F.D.A. Lists Sources of Tainted Drug

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 09:40 GMT

The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday named 22 Chinese companies that it said might be involved in the making of contaminated heparin and issued an alert to stop imports from them.

The Stage 2 Meaningful Use Of EHRs Proposed Rules: No Surprises

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 07:38 GMT

Late in the day on February 23, 2012, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released the preliminary rules for Stage 2 Meaningful Use. For those not deep in the weeds of Health Information Technology policy jargon, “Meaningful Use” is the federal standard for eligible physicians and hospitals to receive incentives through Medicare and [...]

When it Comes to Colonoscopies, Recession and Co-Pays Matter

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 07:34 GMT

By a number of indicators, people have been using fewer medical services during the economic downturn.

Screening colonoscopies apparently aren't immune to that trend, according to a study appearing in the March issue of Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology. The study finds that during the recent recession, commercially insured Americans had fewer of the tests to screen for cancer — a test that saves lives, according to research published just this week.

According to the analysis, there were about 500,000 fewer screening colonoscopies among commercially-insured people aged 50 to 64 than you'd expect during the most recent recession, which officially lasted from December 2007 to June 2009. (The study used the National Bureau of Economic Research's official designation for the recession.)

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends colorectal cancer screening using several methods, including colonoscopy, for adults aged 50 to 75. The analysis didn't find that people forgoing colonoscopy were instead using other, cheaper methods, such as fecal occult blood tests or sigmoidoscopy.

Researchers looked at the rates of screening before and after the recession, then applied their findings to population data to come up with an estimate of 516,309 colonoscopies that would have occurred absent the downturn. Data came from 106 health plans and added up to a nationally representative picture of the commercially insured population, the authors say.

It doesn't include people who didn't have a screening colonoscopy because they lost insurance coverage during the recession, says Spencer Dorn, an author of the study and an assistant professor of medicine in the division of gastroenterology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And it doesn't include Medicare or Medicaid beneficiaries.

The analysis also found that when it comes to colonoscopy, cost sharing appears to be a deterrent. No matter the economic climate, people with higher out-of-pocket costs — $300 or more for the procedure — were less likely to be screened than those with lower costs, defined as $50 or less. That gap “widened during the recession,” says Dorn.

Under the health-care overhaul law, colonoscopy — and other preventive services — must be covered with no cost sharing by Medicare, Medicaid and new private-insurance plans. (“Grandfathered” plans that haven't significantly changed their design are exempt.)

The drop in utilization seen in the study “could have negative consequences down the line,” says Dorn, in terms of cancers being caught at a later stage. (The screening study out this week suggests it might also lead to deaths from the disease.)

The CDC last year reported an increase in screening rates for colorectal cancer from 2002 to 2010, but that estimate included all 50- to 75-year-olds and didn't break down what happened during the intervening years.

Study: GOP Candidates' Plans Would Leader To Larger Deficits

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 04:50 GMT

Proposals put forth by Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum would pile up the largest increases in debt, while Mitt Romney's initial plan, since revised with bigger suggested tax cuts, would increase it by a smaller amount over the next decade.

Defining and Measuring Person-Centered Care in Assisted Living

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 04:30 GMT

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is in the process of identifying person-centered attributes and indicators for its Medicaid home and community-based services programs. To assist CMS and assisted living stakeholders, the Center for Excellence in Assisted Living, a nonprofit collaborative of 11 national organizations, has published recommendations for person-centered HCBS attributes and assisted living indicators.

Capsules: Health IT Coordinator: Release Of Stage 2 Guidelines A 'Push Ahead'

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 04:26 GMT

Now on Kaiser Health News' blog, Chrisitian Torres writes about the new "meaningful use" regulation: "It's time to take electronic health records to the next level. Federal officials on Thursday released their second-stage guidelines for "meaningful use" of electronic records, which advocates say have the potential to reduce medical errors and streamline care. The proposed rules require doctors and hospitals to significantly step up their usage, as well as better engage patients and improve the transferability of records." Check out what else is on the blog.