Medicaid

In a bid to build pressure on Gov. Corbett to expand Medicaid next year, Democratic members of the Pennsylvania Senate Appropriations Committee met Thursday in Philadelphia with city health officials, hospital experts, and advocates for the poor. The session in City Hall came less than two weeks before Corbett is to present his budget proposal for fiscal 2014. Were he to opt for Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, provisions for the rollout starting in October would have to be built into that budget, officials said.

WASHINGTON - Governors who reject health insurance for the poor under the federal health care overhaul could wind up in a politically awkward position on immigration: A quirk in the law means some U.S. citizens would be forced to go without coverage, while legal immigrants residing in the same state could still get it. It's an unintended consequence of how last year's Supreme Court decision changed the Medicaid provisions of President Obama's health...

WASHINGTON - For Gary Alexander, a trip to Capitol Hill on Thursday was full of confrontation. Alexander, the Corbett administration official who oversees Medicaid, was at the center of several charged exchanges as he criticized President Obama's health-care law, faced sharp questions from a congresswoman about children dropped from Pennsylvania's Medicaid rolls, and answered a reporter's inquiries about his use of a state car to commute between Harrisburg...

ANOTHER DAY, another trial balloon to launch over the "fiscal cliff. " In exchange for Republicans' agreeing to allow tax rates on the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans to rise a few percentage points, President Obama reportedly is entertaining the idea of raising the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67. Again. (He reportedly was willing to make this concession during the debt-ceiling crisis in 2011.) Trial balloons are proposals that are floated publicly to gauge political and public reaction, and the negative response to this one should be swift and sharp enough to shred it. It's true that the rising costs to government for Medicare and Medicaid are a major reason that the federal budget deficit is projected to rise in the future.

As governors consider whether to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, a report Monday said that states together face $68 billion in additional Medicaid costs from 2013 to 2022 - even if they all opt out of the expansion. If all states expand the federal-state health insurance program for the poor to people with incomes up to $26,344 for a family of three, based on this year's poverty level, the combined cost for states would be just $8 billion more than if none do, the analysis by the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured said.

With a $27 billion state budget, Pennsylvania should be able to spend less than 1 percent of that amount to make sure 600,000 of its most vulnerable citizens have their basic health-care needs met. That's Harrisburg's estimate of the eventual annual cost several years down the road to expand the state's Medicaid health insurance program. Expanding Medicaid nationwide is a key element in the landmark health-system overhaul, aimed at covering most of the nearly 50 million Americans now without insurance.

More than 100,000 Pennsylvanians who lost Medicaid benefits last year can reapply within the next 30 days, thanks to a settlement between a Philadelphia legal team and the state Department of Public Welfare. Applicants who lost their benefits last year and incurred medical bills could see those bills resolved if the state determines they were eligible for Medicaid all along. Last year, DPW identified about 385,000 households that were overdue for redetermination - in other words, the agency needed to check whether those recipients were still eligible for Medicaid.

INDIANAPOLIS - Indiana stepped between women and their physicians when it enacted a law that blocked Medicaid funds for Planned Parenthood just because the organization provides abortions, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago upheld a lower court's finding that Indiana violated federal regulations when it enacted a law that denied Planned Parenthood Medicaid funds for general health services including cancer screenings.

By David Koitz The United States has run trillion-dollar budget deficits for the past four years, and its debt is now equal to three-quarters of what it will produce this year. President Obama's principal response is to call for greater "equality" - that is, raising the top income-tax rate from 35 percent to 39.6 percent. But taxing the rich isn't the elixir for the largest deficits since World War II: There aren't enough rich people, and the numbers don't add up. Mitt Romney, meanwhile, advocates cutting all income-tax rates to spur economic growth, while covering the revenue loss by limiting still-unspecified deductions and loopholes.