Medicaid squeeze: Shrinking federal reimbursements cause doctors to limit care to needy, By Louise Knott Ahern, November 14, 2010, Lansing State Journal: “In a 16-county swath across Northern Michigan, pregnant women have to drive an hour or more to reach a hospital where they can deliver their babies. From Cheboygan to West Branch to Clare, hospitals have been closing their obstetrics units since last summer in a startling domino effect that has health care activists worried about care availability for rural mothers and babies. But they’re equally alarmed about the reason behind the hospital closures. The hospitals blame, in large part, Medicaid. And health care reform advocates say that reflects a broader problem. Since 2002, the state has been chipping away at how much it reimburses doctors and hospitals for treating Medicaid patients to a point where some say they’ve reached a painful bottom-line reality: It has become too expensive to treat poor people…”
Conservative legislators in Texas seek to opt out of Medicaid, By Dave Montgomery, November 13, 2010, Fort Worth Star-Telegram: “A push from conservative legislators for Texas to opt out of Medicaid is stirring alarm among healthcare providers and nursing homes, which say the potential loss of billions of federal dollars could drastically undercut efforts to provide healthcare for the poor. The opt-out plan has quickly emerged as another high-profile topic for the 2011 Legislature, pushed by Gov. Rick Perry and a number of conservative lawmakers who believe that Texas can provide health coverage to the indigent more efficiently with a state-run plan free of federal mandates…”
Record number of U.S. households face hunger, By Pam Fessler, November 15, 2010, National Public Radio: “The number of Americans who struggled to get enough food last year remained at a record high, according to a report released Monday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. More than 50 million Americans lived in households that had a hard time getting enough to eat at least at some point during 2009. That includes 17 million children, and at least a half-million of those children faced the direst conditions. They had inadequate diets, or even missed meals, because their families didn’t have enough money for food. ‘Household food insecurity remains a serious problem across the United States,’ says Agriculture Undersecretary Kevin Concannon. He says there’s a reason the hunger numbers hit a record high in 2008 and stayed there in 2009: a struggling economy…”
Rise in U.S. hunger slows, but remains high, By Tony Pugh, November 15, 2010, Kansas City Star: “U.S. agriculture officials said Monday that the nation’s 15 federal nutrition programs helped keep hunger in check in 2009 even as the number of unemployed Americans soared. After a record one-year increase from 2007 to 2008, the number of U.S. households facing food shortages increased only slightly last year to roughly 17.4 million, according to a new report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The share of households with members who went hungry or cut their food intake because of money also held steady in 2009, albeit at the highest levels since the data were first collected in 1995…”
17.4 million U.S. families went hungry at some point in 2009, USDA says, By P.J. Huffstutter, November 15, 2010, Los Angeles Times: “About 15% of U.S. households – 17.4 million families – lacked enough money to feed themselves at some point last year, according to a new U.S. Department of Agriculture report. Released Monday, the study also found that 6.8 million of these households – with as many as 1 million children – had ongoing financial problems that forced them to miss meals regularly. The number of these ‘food insecure’ homes, or households that had a tough time providing enough food for their members, stayed somewhat steady from 2008 to 2009. But that number was more than triple compared with 2006, before the recession brought double-digit unemployment…”
