Medicare

Reminiscent of the August 2009 town halls when members of Congress faced angry constituents over health care reforms, a public forum in Carbon County with Rep. Lou Barletta (R-Pa.) Wednesday night provided a glimpse of the strong emotions stirred by a Republican plan to alter Medicare benefits. At the start of his town hall meeting, Barletta welcomed people to use the conversation to get things off their chests. While he was going through a slide projector presentation about the Medicare changes proposed by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.)

WASHINGTON -- Mitt Romney's running mate, Paul Ryan, was booed at the annual AARP convention after saying that, if elected, their Republican administration would repeal the nation's healthcare law as the best way to save Medicare. Just five minutes into his talk at the gathering of the powerful 50-and-older lobby on Friday, the architect of the Republican proposal to change Medicare for the next generation of seniors was repeatedly interrupted as he criticized President Obama's healthcare law. "The first step to a stronger Medicare is to repeal Obamacare, because it represents the worst of both worlds," Ryan said as the crowd in New Orleans booed audibly.

A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers is seeking to repeal a Medicare-pricing provision in the recent "fiscal cliff" deal that benefits biotech giant Amgen Inc. U.S. Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) filed legislation this week to eliminate the exemption for a class of drugs, including Amgen's Sensipar, that are used by kidney dialysis patients. The fiscal-cliff legislation approved earlier this month excluded these oral medications from Medicare price controls for an additional two years.

Health insurer WellPoint Inc. has been barred from adding customers to Medicare plans after it denied prescription drugs to the elderly, endangering their lives, the government said Monday. The sanctions, outlined in a letter to WellPoint from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, followed a "sharp" increase in consumer complaints, the agency said.

Dr. Donald Berwick, the Harvard pediatrician whom President Obama tapped to head the Medicare and Medicaid programs, will step down next week in the face of staunch Republican opposition to his permanent appointment to implement Obama's healthcare law. Berwick, a longtime advocate for patient safety, has been widely hailed by doctors, hospital officials and other healthcare leaders for his trailblazing work to improve the quality and efficiency of...

WOODBRIDGE, Va. -- President Obama blasted his GOPopponent's plan to revamp Medicare and called the program an earned entitlement as he courted the votes of senior citizens on Friday.  “Given the conversations that have been out there in the political arena lately, I want to emphasize Medicare and Social Security are not handouts,” Obama said in remarks delivered via satellite to the AARP conference. “You've paid into these programs your whole lives.  You've earned them.  And as president, it's my job to make sure that Medicare and Social Security remain strong for today's seniors and for future generations.” Obama's remarks were a swipe at GOP hopeful Mitt Romney, who earlier this week took heat for describing those who don't pay federal income taxes as dependent on the government and “victims.” Those non-taxpayers - nearly 47% of taxpayers - include large numbers of seniors who are reliant on Social Security and eligible for tax credits that whittle their federal income tax burden to zero.

WASHINGTON -- As both Democrats and Republicans try to make the November election a choice over competing economic visions for the country, not all congressional Republicans are fans of the GOP budget approach as crafted by Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and embraced by the party's presumptive presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Ten Republicans in the House voted against the blueprint earlier this year, including freshman Rep. David McKinley (R-W.Va.), who is now trumpeting his opposition to the Medicare changes in mailers home to voters in his northern West Virginia district.

More dollars have been dumped into presidential campaign advertising in Florida ($117 million and counting) than any other state. That factoid is a reflection of both the tightness of the presidential race (a tossup) and Florida's rich pile of electoral votes (29) - more than any other battleground. For those reasons, it's worth taking a quick look at the very different messaging strategies the competing presidential campaigns are employing in the state. President Obama is redoubling his attack over the future of Medicare, which jumped to the top of the issue agenda with Mitt Romney's selection of ticket-mate Paul D. Ryan.

A group of liberal voters who said they volunteered and donated to President Obama's 2008 campaign are threatening to pull their support if he signs off on cuts to Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security during ongoing debt negotiations with Republicans. About a dozen members from the Progressive Change Campaign Committee dropped off what they said were 200,000 petitions at Obama's downtown Chicago reelection headquarters Friday morning urging the president to protect the entitlement programs or lose donors and door-knockers who they argued were critical to his victory.

House Republicans unveiled a jobs plan on Thursday as they tried to steer the conversation away from their controversial overhaul of Medicare to their solutions to boost the economy. The package contains proposals aimed at business regulation, energy, tax rates, trade and patents. For the most part, the proposals already have been floated or introduced in the House but have been overshadowed by GOP efforts to cut government spending and overhaul entitlement programs. The Republican push on entitlements, however, took a major hit this week when the party lost a congressional race in western New York that was dominated by the debate over proposed changes to Medicare, the healthcare plan for seniors.