Hmm... sounds like a guy after my own heart!
Remember David O. Brown the next time you read the newspaper and some public official is delivering "it's a personnel matter" bullshit and the media simply accepts the tired line as gospel!
Anyway... I forgot to include a newsbites theme song yesterday, so allow me to make up for that here.
(Folks... like I always say, ya never know what you'll come across via this blog!)
(*GRIN*)
So... next... today's newsbites theme song...
(I just LOVE that song...!!!)
Anyway, folks... enjoy today's newsbites!
5 comments:
* THREE-PARTER... (Part 1 of 3)
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304325004579297052950416982
Expanding Medicaid coverage to an estimated nine million more Americans as mandated by the Affordable Care Act reinforces the idea that Medicaid only serves the poor.
That perception is not accurate.
And it distracts from a looming budgetary threat to the program: long-term care.
Fifteen percent of elderly individuals in the middle-income quintile, 8% in the upper-middle quintile, and 5% in the top quintile receive Medicaid benefits.
More than two-thirds of annual spending on long-term care for the elderly is paid by state and federal governments, $60 billion of which flows from Medicaid.
With 10,000 baby boomers reaching retirement age every day for the next 19 years, the Congressional Budget Office projects that spending on long-term care will more than double by 2050 — to 3% of GDP from 1.3%.
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 3)
We might accept these rising costs if benefits flowed only to the elderly poor, as originally intended. But that is not the case. Significant long-term care benefits flow to individuals in the top 20% of retirement earnings, enabled by Medicaid's generous asset-exclusion limits.
In many states, an elderly person may own a home valued at $802,000, plus home furnishings, jewelry and an automobile of uncapped value while receiving long-term Medicaid support. In addition, they are allowed to have various life-insurance policies, retirement accounts with unlimited assets, $115,920 in assets for a spouse, income from Social Security, and a defined-benefit pension plan. By most standards, such a household would be considered wealthy.
Even these numbers don't capture the burden wealthy individuals place on Medicaid because they live much longer than the poor. Beneficiaries in the top income quintile receive, on average, double the lifetime payouts of those that are less well-off. And because Medicaid lowers reimbursement rates to providers and restricts benefits to contain costs, the poor are tied to lower-quality care and enjoy far less provider flexibility.
Funds for Medicaid are disbursed to the states by the federal government through complicated formulas. States in turn administer Medicaid and long-term care to state residents. While the rules for each state vary, state governments are mandated by law to pursue the estates of wealthy residents to recoup the costs incurred by their use of long-term care programs. Yet the most recent study by Health and Human Services found that most states recoup less than 2% of total long-term care spending. Four states — Alaska, Georgia, Michigan and Texas — even reported no reimbursements whatsoever.
Tightening eligibility rules is the first step toward a solution.
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 3 of 3)
Before receiving Medicaid payouts, for example, wealthier households should first be asked to draw down the value of their home through a reverse mortgage to help pay for long-term care. Wealthier households could also be asked to meet long-term care expenses through life annuity payouts from their retirement accounts. Such changes would help ensure that Medicaid benefits flow to the financially needy.
* MAKES SENSE...
Clearly, alternatives to Medicaid long-term care are needed for those with means, while the safety net for the elderly poor remains intact. Four key policy changes would help transform the system into a more equitable and sustainable one that better serves America's seniors:
First, provide a tax preference for long-term care insurance policies through retirement and health accounts. Allowing tax-free withdrawals from existing 401(k), IRA, or Section 125 accounts to pay for private long-term care insurance would have minimal budget implications. Lower tax revenues would be offset by cost savings provided by wealthier seniors drawing on private resources — rather than public funds — to pay for care.
Second, promote innovative products, such as "life-care" annuities, which marry life annuities to long-term care insurance, allowing individuals to finance their care as well as their retirement. Combining long-term care insurance and life annuities would decrease their combined costs and considerably ease underwriting standards, enabling more seniors to afford long-term care coverage.
Third, foster long-term care partnership programs already operating in most states. These public-private partnerships allow residents to purchase long-term care insurance and still qualify for Medicaid if their insurance is exhausted—without depleting all of their assets. That combines the benefits of private insurance with the backing and safety net of the government.
Fourth, allow a Medicaid "buyout." Upon retirement, individuals should have the choice of receiving a lump-sum payment from the government for a significant portion of the expected value of their Medicaid benefits. Retirees would be obliged to use the payment to purchase private, permanent long-term care insurance in place of Medicaid coverage. This would further reduce Medicaid's future liabilities.
The current Medicaid long-term care program is neither equitable nor fiscally sustainable. If we want Medicaid to cover those who truly need it, we must design an efficient system that leans more heavily on private-sector innovation — such as life-care annuities — and relies on responsible household planning to finance the care of wealthier American retirees.
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-lane-washington-cashes-in-on-connections/2014/01/06/2323019e-76f5-11e3-b1c5-739e63e9c9a7_story.html
This is a tale of a city that is really two cities. In some parts of town, gleaming office-retail complexes rise, home prices reach into the millions and people routinely spend tens of thousands of dollars per year to send their children to private schools. Yet within this same municipality, about one in five households lives in poverty. Many single parents go to bed worrying about how to feed their children or protect them from crime and substandard public-school educations.
This is not Bill de Blasio’s New York. It is Washington, D.C., where the gap between top earners and everyone else is actually greater than that in New York, according to a 2011 Census Bureau report.
Indeed, Washington’s Gini coefficient, a widely used measure of income inequality, is the largest of any U.S. city with more than 500,000 residents except for Atlanta.
Certainly the politicians returning to the nation’s capital for an election-year debate over income inequality should spare some time and attention for the maldistribution going on right outside the doors of Congress. Not only is the gap between rich and poor worse in the District than almost anywhere else, it is arguably less defensible and more instructive.
Americans generally, and quite properly, don’t resent rich people just for being rich. We distinguish between those who exploit connections or insider knowledge to make money and those who get rich by developing extraordinary artistic talents, starting new businesses or inventing useful products.
The former earn our contempt. The latter earn our admiration: Even President Obama, launching his campaign against income inequality last month, paused to acknowledge that “we expect them to be rewarded handsomely.”
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
A large number of Washington’s top earners fit into the less productive category.
Many of them specialize in trading on their connections to D.C.’s biggest “industry,” the federal government.
As of 2012, lobbying for tax breaks, contracts, exclusive licenses, subsidies and the like was a $3.3 billion-a-year industry, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
The average salary of the CEOs — chief lobbyists — of the 30 biggest industry trade associations, including incentives and deferred compensation, was $2.34 million in 2010, according to Bloomberg News.
More than a few of these people used to be governors, senators or members of the House, where they acquired the access that they now sell to the highest bidder.
They are accompanied by a small army of former executive and legislative branch staffers who have gone through the revolving door from government to what Washingtonians euphemistically call “the private sector.”
Economists have a name for this sort of behavior: rent-seeking. In economic parlance, “rent” means the profit from gaining control over existing sources of wealth as opposed to creating new ones. Washington lobbying, and the government-sponsored privileges it secures for various interest groups, is rent-seeking in its purest and most pernicious form.
A good deal of Wall Street activity fits the definition [as well].
Wall Street hedge funds have their carried-interest exemption in the tax code. Farmers are making record incomes yet still benefit from government incentives to grow corn for ethanol. Real estate agents defend the mortgage-interest deduction, even though the benefits go disproportionately to upper-income homeowners. Green-energy subsidies and tax credits generally favor the well-to-do.
Various societies have grown free and prosperous by many different methods; dividing up existing wealth according to political connections is not one of them.
The good news is that, entrenched as special interests and their various special subsidies may be, it is probably more realistic to resist or undo rent-seeking than it is to undo the global forces of trade and technology that have increased income inequality in every developed nation.
Americans neither want nor need to guarantee a low Gini coefficient. What we do have a right to expect, however, is that, to the greatest extent possible, this society’s opportunities and rewards are distributed according to what individuals can do, not whom they know.
Instead of worrying about how much money rich people make, we should focus more on how they make it.
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