I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
Jonathan Cohn, Senior Editor at the New Republic and a Michigan resident, has a column at Kaiser Health News criticizing Attorney General Mike Cox for joining a lawsuit seeking to overturn the recent health care reform bill passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama.
Noting that there are currently around 1.1 million Michigan residents without health insurance, Cohn writes:
Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, the vast majority of the would-be uninsured should gain access to affordable insurance. Based on the official estimates, around 400,000 of them will get it through Medicaid, which the Act will expand. Most of the rest will get them through the new insurance exchanges–that is, the new regulated marketplaces through which individuals and small businesses will be able to purchase the same sort of coverage large businesses get.
The people shopping in the exchanges should have more choices than they do today and the choices will be, by and large, good ones: plans with comprehensive basic benefits, no exclusions or higher rates for pre-existing conditions and lower. Those who can’t afford even these reduced premiums will be eligible for generous tax credits, so that premiums never go higher than around 10 percent of income.
Does Michigan’s Cox prefer a world in which families making $45,000 a year miss out on thousands of dollars in tax credits? Where people with pre-existing medical conditions have to pay astronomical rates on coverage, if they can get insurance at all? Does he think those 400,000 people set to get Medicaid coverage would be better with no insurance? And, if so, has he taken this up with the professionals and hospitals struggling, every day, to provide charity care for these people?
As we reported a few weeks ago, many Michigan hospitals are suffering enormous financial problems due primarily to two causes — the number of uninsured patients they must care for and the number of patients with Medicaid they must pay for, because Medicaid pays far lower rates than either Medicare or private insurance.
Many hospitals are having to close down obstetrics units as a result, particularly in rural areas, leaving large areas of the state — including 16 contiguous counties in rural northern Michigan — without any hospitals that provide pre- or post-natal care of pregnant women and their babies.
The health care reform bill would help solve both problems by reducing the number of uninsured patients and by raising the Medicaid reimbursement rates up to match those of Medicare.
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