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How Ideas from Private Industry Help Combat Medicare Fraud, Waste and Abuse

"While the financial services industry has had prolonged success combating fraudulent transactions with technology-based solutions, it is important to realize that the rate of improper payments was perhaps at most 0.1-0.2 percent. The estimated level of improper payments in Medicare is 50-100 times higher. This level of endemic fraud, waste, and abuse is best addressed through incentives for all stakeholders, implementation of multiple, differentiated and decentralized solutions, and establishment of stretch goals for combating improper payments."  MORE >>

Marco Rubio's Plan to Fix America's Retirement System

"Rubio proposed raising the retirement age for younger workers, opening up the retirement program used by Congress to non-government workers, and eliminating the payroll tax for people who continue to work after reaching full retirement age. Rubio also proposed scaling back Social Security benefits for wealthy retirees by slowing how quickly benefits will increase for those retirees who may not rely as much on Social Security payments."  MORE >>

Health Reform: Reinventing the Wheel, Health Affairs Blog, October 12th, 2006, and Comment

Excerpt: The American health care systems perform impressively, producing what they are designed to deliver: cost inflation, inefficiency, and inequity. [Alan Maynard writes on Porter and Teisberg's reinvention of the health care system wheel.]  MORE >>

Regarding the Recent Article on Massachusetts Health Reform: What Were They Thinking at Health Affairs?

Based on telephone surveys, the authors declare that RomneyCare 'continued to fare well in 2010.' This is an important finding, as the authors consider RomneyCare 'the template for the federal Affordable Care Act of 2010.' Unfortunately, in several cases the authors fail to inform readers that their results are contradicted by other, possibly more reliable, sources of information. They also neglect to put some of their results in proper context.

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Getting Frank with Robert Frank

"[Robert Frank said, in a recent article,] 'We must ask those who would repeal ObamaCare how they propose to solve the adverse-selection problem.' ... For the past several years, federally sponsored risk pools all over the country have allowed people with pre-existing conditions to pay the same premiums as healthy people and obtain health insurance. And about 107,000 people have been able to do this without interfering with the premiums of anyone else. Voila! We solved the problems of 107,000 without requiring anything (other than about $6 billion in taxes) from the other 330 million."

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How Justice Robert's 'Flying Squirrel' Maneuver Will Take Down the Affordable Care Act

"[A]nalysts were quick to characterize [the] Supreme Court decision as a ringing vindication of the Affordable Care Act and a big political victory for a struggling President Obama. However, on closer reading, the instant analysts were wrong. The Roberts Court actually punched a huge hole in the law, potentially reducing its historic coverage expansion by as much as a third. In addition, the Court's ruling will set off serious political conflict in southern and mid-western states that will ripple through those states' health care markets, and fracture hospitals' and health plans' support for health reform."  MORE >>

111-Page Report by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: New Directions to a Healthier America (PDF)

111 pages. Excerpt: We found the strongest evidence for interventions that can have a lasting effect on the quality of health and life in programs that promote early childhood development and that support children and families. Therefore, many of our recommendations aim to ensure that our children have the best start in life and health. Along with social advantage and disadvantage, health is often passed across generations. Strategies for giving children a healthy start will help ensure future generations of healthy adults. This is indeed a wise long-term investment of scarce resources.

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Seeking to Preserve Obamacare, Chief Justice Roberts Eviscerated It

"Conservative lawyers consoled themselves in defeat by focusing on the silver linings in Roberts' legal rationale, but there is no such consolation from the conservative policy perspective. And while liberals were initially elated that the court had left the law standing, they, too, are anguished. The central goal of the law was to increase access to health insurance toward their holy grail of universal coverage, but Roberts destroyed that by making enrollment in private health insurance and the Medicaid expansion optional."  MORE >>

ERISA Attorney Robert E. 'Rob' Hoskins Dies

Prominent attorney Robert E. "Rob" Hoskins, 50, died on February 27. A partner in the Greenville, South Carolina office of Foster Law Firm, LLC, Rob handled ERISA and insurance claims involving long term disability, health insurance, life insurance, accidental death and dismemberment insurance, and pension/retirement matters before various courts including the U.S. Supreme Court. He wrote and lectured extensively on ERISA. His peers rated him as an "AV" lawyer in Martindale-Hubble. Rob was a co-administrator of ERISABoard.com, a popular forum for ERISA attorneys, where he contributed over 4,300 posts. His complete biography is online. Services in Greenville are on March 3. He will be greatly missed.  MORE >>

Harkin, Roberts Introduce Bipartisan Legislation in Senate to Liberalize Funding Rules for Charities and Cooperatives

"The Cooperative and Small Employer Charity [CSEC] Pension Flexibility Act of 2013 would ensure that charitable and cooperative associations are not swept into the Pension Protection Act of 2006 funding rules, which would require them to divert funds from critical services and jeopardize their ability to provide pension benefits to their workers.... CSEC plans would have the flexibility to opt into PPA in 2014 if they want, and importantly, the Act imposes additional transparency requirements on CSEC plans so that participants have access to accurate information. The Act also provides for a 'time out' from scheduled increases to PBGC premiums."

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Department of Veterans Affairs Leads in Changing the Telehealth Landscape

"As a general rule, most telehealth practitioners are required to comply with various and state-specific licensing, registration, and certification requirements in order to render health care services via telehealth ... [T]he VA is exercising its authority as a federal agency to preempt conflicting state laws relating to the practice of medicine or other health care services via telehealth."  MORE >>

Robert Kiyosaki Says 'The 401(k) Is a Trap for Most People'

"Robert Kiyosaki is the author of 'Rich Dad, Poor Dad.' He also has a very controversial opinion on 401(k) plans. While most financial experts recommend these workplace retirement plans and think investing in them is the key to a secure retirement, Kiyosaki believes they are a trap."  MORE >>

Robert Nagle, an Architect of ERISA, Dies at 84

"Robert E. Nagle, who as general counsel of the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare was one of the architects of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, died on Saturday [August 16, 2014] in McLean, Va., following a battle with cancer. He was 84."  MORE >>

Statement of Robert Greenstein on the 2014 Social Security Trustees' Report

"The trustees caution that their projections are uncertain. For example, they estimate an 80 percent probability that trust fund exhaustion would occur between 2029 and 2038 -- and a 95 percent chance that it would happen between 2028 and 2041."  MORE >>

Roberts Rules: First Impressions of the Supreme Court Ruling

"There can be no argument that Chief Justice Roberts crossed [the Anti-Injunction Act] bridge with a deftness that even his critics would have to admire. The opinion is a prime example of adroit lawyering, a veritable tour de force. Lawyers can certainly appreciate the art with which Roberts builds his case. But much of the general public is bound to find unsatisfactory this twisting of the word 'tax' to have entirely contradictory meanings when exactly the same economic event is tested under two separate and distinctive legislative enactments in the same litigation by the same judges on the same day, in one with the object of reaching a no-tax conclusion, in the other a tax conclusion."

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Robert J. Myers, Longtime Chief Actuary of SSA, Dies at the Age of 97

"Robert J. Myers, Chief Actuary of the Social Security Administration (1947-1970), passed away from pneumonia on Sunday, February 14."  MORE >>

Think Tanks Talk Back to Robert J. Samuelson

Excerpt: Last week, Robert J. Samuelson criticized think tanks as failing to offer reasonable ways to address 'the huge budget costs of aging baby boomers' ['Making the Think Tanks Think,' op-ed, Aug. 1]. [The target page contains] three responses to Samuelson's argument[.]

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Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: 'We Will Reverse the Epidemic of Childhood Obesity'

Excerpt: Coast to coast, the insidious spread of childhood obesity is the rule rather than the exception, even in the most food-secure corners of the country. City, suburbia, exurbia, rural countryside -- no family or community is immune.... Unless we turn back the epidemic of obesity at its point of origin -- among our children -- our society will pay a terrible human and financial price for as far out into the future as we can see.

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Testimony of IRS Commissioner Koskinen Before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Implementation of the ACA

"While the operation of these Marketplaces is overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the IRS has the limited role of providing Marketplaces with data and computational services for use in their determinations about eligibility for financial assistance.... The IRS, through this computational service, provides the Marketplace with a single figure: the maximum advance premium tax credit for which the applicant may be eligible based on those data inputs.... During the 2015 open enrollment period, the IRS processed more than 25 million requests for federal tax return data and more than 17 million computational requests, with an average IRS response time of less than five seconds."  MORE >>

Attorney Robert Toth's Comment Letter to DOL Outlines the Structure of PEPs

"[T]he new PEP rules do not add any new services to the marketplace. Rather, PEPs merely reorganize existing services to be provided in a different format, with the one exception is that it now permits unrelated employers to be able to file a consolidated Form ... [T]he Department's issuance of guidance as to the allocation of these different authorities ... is a required condition precedent to the determination of whether any prohibited transaction exemptive relief is necessary in the operation of a PEP."  MORE >>