Posts tagged 'Health Care Reform'

October 23, 2017

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Trump Appears to Want More from Bipartisan Health Care Reform Bill

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R.-Ky.) over the weekend signaled he would bring the Alexander-Murray bipartisan health legislation to a floor vote if President Trump wants him to do so. Trump officials, however, said the bill needs to be expanded to axe the individual and employer health insurance mandates and offer less comprehensive policies for lower-income people through associatio...

December 29, 2010

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IRS Hands Holiday Gift to Companies with Cadillac Health Plans

Cadillac insurance plans Health Care Reform health insurers highly paid executives IRS

Commencing Jan. 1, 2011, a provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) was set to prohibit companies from offering more expensive health insurance plans to top executives, armed with a fine of $100 per day for each such highly insured executive. Previously, this requirement had applied only to self-insured plans, but come the New Year, it was to apply to all non-grandfat...

June 30, 2010

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ACA Patient Bill of Rights Finalized

Health Care Reform Patient's Bill of Rights PPACA

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on June 28 published a Final Rule in the Federal Register implementing provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). The provisions were dubbed "The Patient's Bill of Rights" by the agency. This Final Rule takes effect Sept. 23, but it breaks little ground from the sweeping PPACA legislation other than to c...

April 1, 2010

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Health Reform Mandates Chain Restaurant Calorie Counts

calorie counts Health Care Reform National Restaurant Association restaurants

The National Restaurant Association saw it as a "devil we know" over a bunch of pending state regulations that were "devils we don't know," so Obamacare--the recent health care reform package--includes a provision for chain restaurants to post calorie counts and nutritional information for their menu items. Now, as with other federal laws and regulations, states generally fe...

July 8, 2009

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The Public Option Could Bankrupt the Whole System

health care Health Care Reform public option

I found this great graph on a site called The Glittering Eye that shows exactly what will happen to costs when the public option takes over. Note how the U.S. costs for health care are stable and relatively equal to other countries up to the age of 65 when the current public option, Medicare, kicks in. Gee, once health care in America becomes subsidized at age 65, people flock to their docto...

June 1, 2009

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Duelling Memos: Baucus and Kennedy Go Head to Head

Health Care Reform

This past week saw Ted Kennedy and his Senate Committee on Health (and a zillion other things) issue a paper on how the Massachusetts Senator envisions America's new health care system. Now, his counterpart over in Senate Finance, Senator Max Baucus of Montana, has joined the fray with his own paper on the subject. Actually, there's not much difference in the two, but Baucus reveals some juicy...

February 5, 2009

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Whole Lotta Health Care Day Dreamin' Goin' On

Health Care Reform Medicaid Medicare

As I noted in a previous posting, our current health care delivery system logs in as a $7,000-per-person-per-year behemoth. And I mean per all 300 million of us. (Do the math: $2.1 trillion divided by 300 mil.) That's why I get a good laugh everytime I read the results of a new survey. The one I came across today from the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University is full of comments by e...

February 2, 2009

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Group Says Single-Payer Can Be Created for $50 Billion

Health Care Reform Medicare single-payer health care

A group going by the name of Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) has solved the Riddle of the (Health Care) Sphinx, or so it proclaims. The PDA folk claim that, by just extending Medicare to all Americans (thereby jettisoning, one would presume, all other current health care delivery systems), the country could--bugles blaring, drums rolling--create 2,613,495 million new, permanent, good-pa...

January 24, 2009

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Stop Making Sense; No One Is Going to Listen Anyway

Health Care Reform Medicaid Medicare

If you're been following the ongoing cyber-debates about how to reform health care, you've no doubt run into a lot of wishful thinking, as in, "If the government pays for health care, then it's free." Wrong for all kinds of obvious reasons, most notable of which is that either you or your employer is going to have to pay for your coverage--unless you qualify under a government program because ...

January 20, 2009

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Chances of Health Care Reform: Check Out This List

health care Health Care Reform insurance companies lobbyists

I found this interesting. It was on some far-left (the author called himself progressive, but he was way off the spectrum) blog, and it's a list of who's received the most in campaign donations from the insurance industry, to wit: John McCain (R-AZ) $2,799,156 Barack Obama (D-IL) $2,184,670 Chris Dodd (D-CT) $2,138,446 Earl Pomeroy (Blue Dog-ND) $1,735,356 Charlie Rangel (D-NY) $1,346,785 Ben ...

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U.S. Department of Labor Officially Restores Prior Overtime Exemption Rules

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