With focus on income inequality, Albany bill will seek $8.50 minimum wage, By John Eligon, January 29, 2012, New York Times: “The Occupy Wall Street encampment at Zuccotti Park is no more, but the focus it brought to income inequality is having an impact in Albany and beyond. The Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, a Manhattan Democrat, plans to introduce a bill on Monday to raise the state’s minimum wage to $8.50 an hour, a 17 percent increase. The bill also calls for the minimum wage to be adjusted each year for inflation. Mr. Silver’s action follows similar steps by lawmakers across the country: Delaware recently passed a minimum wage increase, and raises are being considered in California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri and New Jersey…”
Day: January 30, 2012
Medicaid Patients and Dental Care
Without dental coverage, patients seek pain relief in ER, By Alison Bath, January 28, 2012, Shreveport Times: “Louisiana spent $1.7 million on Medicaid patients who visited statewide emergency rooms seeking pain relief from toothaches during fiscal year 2010-11. The year before, the state paid $1.66 million for the same reason, according to Department of Health and Hospitals data. Those hospital visits didn’t solve the problem. Unlike dentists and oral surgeons, ER doctors and other physicians can’t pull a tooth. So, the thousands of Medicaid and other government health program recipients who visit an ER each year in Louisiana seeking help for toothaches, tooth abscesses and other dental emergencies receive only palliative care and a referral to an oral surgeon…”
State Medicaid Program – Colorado
Medicaid dispute pits ‘shared responsibility,’ care of poor, By Michael Booth, January 29, 2012, Denver Post: “Colorado policymakers are wrestling to bring the burgeoning Medicaid budget under control, as critics fear health insurance for the poor will consume the state budget. But even the smallest cuts or cost-shares raise protests from patient advocates and objections that such measures will prove more expensive in the long run. ‘Sharing responsibility’ by raising co-pays and enrollment fees for public health care actually discourages patients from seeking care until they require budget-busting emergency or specialty help, researchers say. ‘There is indisputable evidence that when you ask poor people to pay more for medical care, some of them cannot afford it, so they avoid seeking the doctor or cannot afford their medications,’ said Leighton Ku, director of the Center for Health Policy Research at George Washington University. Some of those patients, Ku said, will eventually require ‘the most expensive forms of care at emergency rooms or in hospitals.’ The constraints inherent in Medicaid – a tangled web of mandates, entitlements and patients’ behavior – frustrate critics, who see the program growing even more onerous. Federal health reform and expansions from a state hospital fee will add hundreds of thousands of people to public insurance rolls who are unlikely to ever leave…”