Joan Retsinas
Raising Medicare eligibility is not the way to curb costs
From 65 to 67. Only two years. What’s the big deal? Candidate Romney, who just turned 65, has proposed upping the age of Medicare...
Supreme Court case plaintiffs may benefit from Obamacare
As Obamacare wends its way through the judicial labyrinth, let’s glance at the plaintiffs. Not the state attorneys general. Not the small-business federations. But...
Romneycare not end of the world
Millions of Americans have been watching, waiting, for the sky to fall on the commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Two years ago the state passed a...
Dickens’ ‘Christmas Carol’ still instructs on how to care
Charles Dickens’ emotional roller coaster is a powerful seasonal talisman: we’ve cried over Tiny Tim, cheered Scrooge’s spirit-driven generosity, and, at the end, sighed...
Beyond simple crimes: Medicare fraud runs deeper
Think Medicare. Now think fraud.
We have marshaled Eliot Ness-type teams to hunt it. Earlier this year, a national Fraud Strike Force, comprising 700...
Beware political neophytes, pure but unskilled at governing
Voters want to send Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith to Washington to wade into the muck of politics and rescue us from … government? Liberals?...
Sunshine works for medicine as well as for government
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis urged sunshine for government: let the people see what their legislators are doing. Democracy will thrive when citizens...
Many are dropping down the linguistic rabbit hole of Medicare ‘observation’
Plop! These past two years a lot of Medicare beneficiaries have plopped down the linguistic rabbit-hole of Medicare.
Consider the commonsense meaning of “observation.”...
CLASS is the vegetable in health care reform pot
Bismarck was right: every law is a sausage, with programs thrown almost haphazardly into the pot. In a House-passed bill that proposes to expand...
Big Brother deserves pat on back for smoking bans
“Big Brother.” The phrase conjures up an overbearing omnipresence that watches, disparagingly, everybody. Totalitarian states are big brothers; so are the “nanny states” that...
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