(9 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
So Medicaid is now in trouble, according to this Reuter’s article:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Spending on the Medicaid health program for the poor is on a path to grow at a much higher rate than the overall U.S. economy in the next 10 years, officials said on Friday.
Spending on Medicaid benefits will increase 7.3 percent from 2007 to 2008, reaching $339 billion, and will expand at an annual average of 7.9 percent over the next decade, hitting $674 billion by 2017, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said in a report.
Over that same time span, the projected rate of growth for the overall economy is 4.8 percent, the report stated.
The report’s release comes at a time of growing worry over the fact that health spending has become an increasing burden on individual Americans, businesses and governments.
And what does our esteemed Secretary of Health and Human Services, the Bush-appointed Michael Leavitt, have to say about this?
“This report should serve as an urgent reminder that the current path of Medicaid spending is unsustainable for both federal and state governments,” Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said in a statement.
“If nothing is done to rein in these costs, access to health care for the nation’s most vulnerable citizens could be threatened.”
Let’s take a look at Mr. Leavitt, who is so concerned about the health of poor people.
Perhaps you’ll recall the recent Federal Regulation 45 CFR Part 88 (warning: pdf) which Mr. Leavitt championed, “protecting” anti-abortion health care workers from having to do their jobs when it comes to women’s health.
The Bush administration yesterday (Ed. note: August 21, 2008) announced plans to implement a controversial regulation designed to protect doctors, nurses and other health-care workers who object to abortion from being forced to deliver services that violate their personal beliefs.
The rule empowers federal health officials to pull funding from more than 584,000 hospitals, clinics, health plans, doctors’ offices and other entities if they do not accommodate employees who refuse to participate in care they find objectionable on personal, moral or religious grounds.
“People should not be forced to say or do things they believe are morally wrong,” Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said. “Health-care workers should not be forced to provide services that violate their own conscience.”
Before Michael Leavitt was doing a heckuva good job at Health and Human Resources, he was head of the EPA. Upon his nomination, Friends of the Earth had this to say:
The EPA administrator has become a figurehead for the president’s extreme anti-environmental agenda, and Governor Mike Leavitt is the perfect one for the job.
From wilderness to wetlands, Leavitt has routinely fought for corporate interests at the expense of our environment. He recently cut a backroom deal with the Interior Department that will open millions of acres of Utah wilderness to drilling, mining and off-road vehicle use. He entered another secret settlement that will open wilderness areas, national parks and other public lands to roadbuilding. And he supports the notorious Legacy Highway, which will devastate wetlands near Utah’s great Salt Lake.
Governor Leavitt is a moderate sounding wolf in sheep’s clothing. He’s mastered the rhetoric of “balance” and “cooperation,” but in the Bush administration those are code words for more mining, drilling and pollution. Judging by his record, Leavitt should fit right in with this approach.
And according to the Sierra Club (again upon hearing of Leavitt’s nomination in 2003):
Clean water enforcement is among the worst in the nation under Governor Leavitt. Utah recently tied for last in enforcing the Clean Water Act, according to an EPA report dated February 2003. (Washington Post, June 6, 2003) According to the EPA report, Utah’s clean water enforcement program was so bad that it tied for dead last, with Ohio and Tennessee, in six key measures of effectiveness. Also of note, one of Leavitt’s first acts as governor was to fire the Division of Wildlife Resources enforcement official who had fined the Leavitt family’s fish farm for violations that brought the devastating whirling disease to Utah.
Yet his nomination passed. He served only for little more than a year and I guess he cleaned up everything so he could go on to be the Secretary of Health and Human Resources.
So yeah, we have problems with Medicaid and with our health care infrastructure generally. I’m so grateful to Mike Leavitt for his concern. I’m sure that while he’s been working for George, he’s done a heckuva good job. It’s not his fault all those lazy poor people need healthcare. This problem couldn’t possibly have anything to do with him.
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Can’t wait to see them leave.
….but Medicaid is a huge problem, NPK. Really.
Our state has the highest Medicaid expenditures in the country. The NYT reported in 2005 that we may be losing 40% of our Medicaid expenditures – a figure of well over $15 billion per annum – to fraud alone, not to mention all the other major problems with this. Federal Medicare expenditures alone (which is a fraction of total Medicare spending) is double the percentage of total government spending that it was under Carter, is growing faster than any other category of government spending, and is nearing the size of government expenditures on military spending, which we can both agree are outrageous. Worse still, these expenditures have shown little significant effect on health outcomes for Americans.
One very simple (yet likely unpopular) way that policy can help our country is if Democrats get behind proposals to add thousands of auditors to Medicare, Medicaid, and the IRS. We’re losing billions, and gaining nothing from it. Let’s start our plan for government job creation there.
with their higher than ours tax rates. The difference is the general populace actually gets something for their tax dollars. I partly surmise his is only true because Europe had their history interrupted by something called WWII. As such their history of graft and corruption/incompetence/greed/ignorance in government has only had that far shorting time to manifest itself unlike our history which now includes funding for tazers to zap unruly wheelchair bound people.
The really sick thing about the Leavitts of the world is that they “graduate” after having US governmental experience under their belt and go on to more globally oriented organizations like the World Bank or the CFR.
So no, they never really “leave”.