Posts by Mike Lillis

It happens in every recession: Medicaid enrollment leaps at precisely the same time that states are least able to afford the additional costs. The structural flaw has left state lawmakers threatening program cuts, Congress scrambling to find emergency funds to prevent a coverage crisis, and children’s health advocates urging an overhaul in the way Medicaid is funded. Trouble is, the Democrats’ health reform proposals do nothing to address the problem.

The push is on to dilute the climate change bills moving through Congress, and it’s not coming only from conservatives. Mother Jones’ Kate Sheppard reports today that 14 Senate Democrats — including Minnesota’s Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar — are urging their leadership to amend the proposal to grant more free polluting permits to the [...]

How effectively will the House health care bill cover children? Turns out, it depends on where they live.

“Mr. Secretary, I’m not a man that fears this administration or you,” Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-Pa.) told Geithner. “But I do fear the accumulation of power exercised by someone in the future that can be extraordinary.”

A protracted partisan skirmish has left hundreds of thousands of Americans without unemployment benefits — an impasse Senate Democrats hope to break this week.

Democrats have vowed to keep the cost of health reform below $900 billion over 10 years, while also promising that the legislation won’t add “one dime” to the nation’s debt. Now they find themselves in the uncomfortable position of claiming that an overhaul of the way doctors are paid under Medicare is somehow not part of health care reform.

WASHINGTON — Earlier this month, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield of Maine raised eyebrows when it sued the state for refusing to grant an 18.5 percent premium hike on 12,000 individual policy holders — an increase that would have generated a 3 percent profit margin for the company. Instead, Maine’s insurance superintendent granted a 10.9 [...]

When the Labor Department last week revealed that the economy shed more than 260,000 jobs in September, Republicans knew exactly where to place the blame. On the “tax-and-spend policies” of Democrats. What the GOP fails to note is that job creation has trailed almost every other indicator of economic recovery in the wake of recessions going back at least 20 years.

As conservatives — including Minnesota’s Michele Bachmann — warn that the Democrats’ health reform plans would stick government bureaucrats between doctors and patients, a number of consumers, physicians and former insurance industry employees told lawmakers Wednesday that such bureaucrats are already in place: they’re called private insurance companies. And, bound to shareholders above patients, the witnesses said, these companies are playing a sometimes-deadly game of withholding payments for doctor-prescribed services simply to inflate profits.

Unlike the Republicans, who adopted the strong conservative position of resisting almost every Democratic reform proposal from the start, Democratic leaders ruled out the liberal single-payer proposal early in the debate. Now they’re finding they have little leverage to force a strong public plan.