The Congressional Super Committee negotiations are coming down to the wire, and Republicans are demanding that Medicare privatization be included in any final budget deal. The news comes on the heels of GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s recent call for creation of a “premium support” option that would let seniors choose between traditional fee-for-service Medicare [...] [read full article…]
Opponents of the Obama Administration’s health care reform law were overjoyed last month when the government threw in the towel on one of its controversial features: creation of a public option for long-term care. A portion of the reform law called The Community Living Assistance Services and Support (or CLASS Act) aimed to expand the [...] [read full article…]
Reading about Mitt Romney’s Medicare privatization proposal this morning, my first question was: How is this different than Medicare Advantage? Romney called for allowing Americans over 65 to choose between traditional fee-for-service Medicare and private plans that would be shopped via a federally-sponsored Medicare exchange. Seniors who choose this option would receive a “generous defined [...] [read full article…]
Now that the official Social Security cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) and Medicare Part B premiums have been announced for 2012, we can tote up the numbers to see how seniors will fare. All in all, the news is pretty good – a 3.6 percent COLA coupled with a much smaller-than-expected increase in the premium for Part [...] [read full article…]
The federal government threw in the towel on creating a public option for long-term care coverage last week, and that would seem to be definitive for now. In defeat, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was doing the right thing in admitting the concept’s flaws and cutting the government’s losses of the proposal, [...] [read full article…]
