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Posts Tagged ‘Medicaid’

Peter Cramton: Medicare Auction Gadfly

My friend and co-author Peter Cramton continues his two-year crusade to improve the workings of “Medicare’s Bizarre Auction Program.”  You can watch his YouTube testimony before the United States House Committee on Small Business here.

(See also his Oral Testimony, Transcript of Hearing, Video of Entire Hearing.)

Peter’s supplemental comments are particularly devastating in rebutting two claims of Lawrence Wilson, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Director of the Chronic Care Group:

CMS [claim]: “CMS worked closely with stakeholders to design and implement the program.”

Mr. Wilson. “CMS worked closely with stakeholders to design and implement the program in a way that is fair for suppliers and sensitive to the needs of beneficiaries.”


Entitled to Know

I’m back to inviting readers to submit quotations whose origins they want me to try to trace, using my book, The Yale Book of Quotations, and my more recent researches.
jennifer atkinson asked:

“When did we start calling social security, medicare, and medicaid ‘entitlements’? Seems like they might well be deemed obligations.”

The Oxford English Dictionary does not yet include this sense of the word “entitlement,” but I believe that it originated with or was at least popularized by pioneering legal scholar Charles Reich. Reich used “entitlement” meaning “right to governmental benefits” in his landmark article “Individual Rights and Social Welfare: The Emerging Legal Issues” in the Yale Law Journal in 1965. He had earlier used the corresponding sense of the verb “entitled” in his even more landmark article “The New Property” in the Yale Law Journal in 1964.
Do any readers have any other quotations whose origins they would like me to attempt to trace?


Do Results of Oregon's Medicaid Lottery Boost the Case for Obamacare?

One of the many debates over the new health care law is whether increased access to health insurance really improves the public’s overall health and financial security. Even though there are hundreds of studies comparing insured and uninsured groups of people, there’s nothing definitive so far that answers the question one way or the other. The problem is getting clean data which clearly demonstrates behavior before and after people have had access to health care, rather than comparing two separate groups of people.
But a new study by a group of economists and health care researchers may provide the first empirical evidence that shows expanding health care coverage to low-income individuals does result in better reported health, more preventative care, and improved financial well-being.