Medicaid

Re: "States still in recovery," Sunday: Under no circumstances should Pennsylvania or New Jersey qualify for any additional federal Medicaid assistance until they have reduced their respective public-sector labor costs by no less than 25 percent. According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, public- and private-sector compensation levels mirrored one another until 1980. By 2008, state and local employees enjoyed a 44.6 percent compensation advantage over their private-sector counterparts, a figure that did not reflect relative degrees of productivity.

Government funding for abortion - like the right to abortion itself - is a highly emotional issue in which each side stands firmly on principle. The case for Medicaid-funded abortions for poor women, which Bill Clinton supported as a candidate and is now seeking to make public policy, is simple: Women have a constitutional right to abortion, and it is fundamentally unfair that it is much harder for poor women to exercise that right. Yet since 1981, Congress has forbidden federal funding for abortion unless the pregnancy endangers the woman's life.

The road from welfare to work for thousands of Pennsylvania's poorest families is a bit smoother now that Medicaid coverage has been reinstated for those who lost it during the transition, Mayor Rendell announced yesterday. The state Department of Public Welfare was persuaded to temporarily restore coverage for 32,000 residents - two-thirds children - after 10 months of discussions with three advocacy groups, who each had representatives at the City Hall noon press conference. "We don't often win them these days, but when we do. . .they are nice to win," Rendell said of the city's often heated dealings with the welfare department.

IN HIS BUDGET address Tuesday, Gov. Corbett is expected to highlight plans for corralling the staggering costs of state-employee pension obligations. In many ways, the pensions paid to some workers - particularly lawmakers - is a story of privilege and plenty. Lawmakers can collect their full pensions, averaging $35,000 a year, at age 50. (State employees wait until age 60, and theirs average $23,000 a year.) These numbers are important to remember when looking at the flip side: the millions of families in the state who make far less in salaries than state employees make in pensions.

What first-term governor would welcome a legacy of letting thousands of low-income adults and children slip through widening holes in his state's health-care safety net? Gov. Corbett may be coming around to the realization that his track record in this area isn't likely to win many points with Pennsylvania voters around reelection time next year. Because of Corbett's austere spending policies, 41,000 working-poor adults lost access to adultBasic, the low-cost state health plan, almost as soon as he took the oath of office in early 2011.

The first part of a financial double whammy for health-care providers in Pennsylvania and across the nation hit yesterday when President Bush released his 2006 budget proposal. The Bush administration proposes cutting Medicaid spending by tens of billions of dollars over the next decade. "It is fair to say that, at $60 billion, both the hospitals and nursing homes would be negatively impacted" if the Bush budget were enacted, said Tom Nickels, chief lobbyist of the American Hospital Association in Washington.

A former executive with a pharmaceutical distributors trade group alleges in a federal whistle-blower lawsuit that 13 drug companies manipulated price data to reduce the amounts they owed federal and state governments for the taxpayer-funded Medicaid program that serves the poor. The number of companies named as defendants has fluctuated. The original filing accused 30 companies. The fourth and most recent version of the complaint, unsealed this week in Philadelphia, accused 13 companies: Allergan, Amgen, AstraZeneca, Biogen, Bradley, Cephalon, Eisai, Genzyme, Mallinckrodt, NovoNordisk, Reliant, Sunovion, and Upsher-Smith.

KHELI Muhammad was trying to schedule a routine pediatrician's appointment last summer when she discovered that her 2-year-old son, who has a congenital heart disorder, had been kicked off the Medicaid rolls. The 30-year-old mother of two boys was stunned. "It is written in stone that he's covered," Muhammad said of Samad, who qualifies for Medicaid based on his serious medical condition, not the family's income level. "He's pacemaker-dependent . . . [H]is heart will not beat without a pacemaker.

Gov. Christie plans to seek approval for a proposal that would deny Medicaid coverage to adults in a family of four with an annual household income of little more than $6,000, down from the current $30,000. A single mother raising three children who earned as little as $118 a week would not qualify for the government-funded medical coverage. The eligibility-requirement change, which must be cleared by the Obama administration and would apply only to new adult Medicaid applicants, would follow Christie's eliminating - for the second year - a long-standing line item that would provide nearly $7.5 million in funding to family-planning clinics.

There's always something pushing reform of the American health-care system to the bottom of the agenda. This week, out of the blue, it was a Soviet coup. That's not exactly how the National Governors' Association had planned it. In an August that was shaping up dull and slow, they'd counted on this week's Seattle conference to rekindle interest in a matter that the states want dealt with in the worst way: Health costs are eating state budgets up as they rise 25 percent annually. The governors didn't get their wish, obviously.