Massachusetts Personal Injury Library
Massachusetts senators pledge support for major health care reform andoverma
Massachusetts attorney Thomas M. Kiley, http://www.tomkileylaw.com, concentrates on legal issues affecting health care, particularly for children. A recent article in the Boston Globe states that Massachusetts Senators Edward Kennedy and Max Baucussupport major health care reform by the government. Senators Edward M. Kennedy and Max Baucus sent a public letter on February 6th to President Obama assuring him of their commitment to passing a major healthcare bill this year.
“We have a moral duty to ensure that every American can get quality health care,” the senators’ letter said. “Incremental efforts will no longer suffice and we cannot afford to wait any longer. With your continued leadership and commitment, we remain certain that our goal of enacting comprehensive health care reform can be accomplished this year.”
Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and Kennedy, chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, have been working together for almost a year to prepare the way for a bill they hoped to send to the Senate floor in the first 100 days of the new administration.
“As you have emphasized, we must act now,” they wrote Obama. “The ranks of the uninsured grow larger each day. The cost of healthcare to families, businesses and government are crippling and, although we spend more on healthcare than any other country, the quality of care provided by America’s healthcare system is often uneven compared to other industrialized nations.”
The Senators also urged President Obama to quickly find a new nominee to head up the Department of Health and Human Services since former Sen. Tom Daschle had to withdraw for tax reasons. Health advocates were disappointed in this news because they felt Daschle would have been a good advocate for health reform.
In a related issue, President Obama sent a memorandum to the Department of Health and Human Services lifting a Bush-era directive to states that restricted middle class families from getting government health insurance, according to an article in the Boston Glove.
The article said the Bush administration said in 2007 that it would strictly adhere to guidelines that limited the scope of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). A year later, the administration decided not to penalize states that enrolled middle-class children without first proving they had enrolled nearly all poorer children first.
In the memorandum to the Department of Health and Human Services, President Obama said that “tens of thousand of children have been denied health care coverage” because of the Bush directive.
Under the restrictions, at least 95 percent of poor children eligible for Medicaid or SCHIP had to already be in those programs before states could begin using federal funds to cover higher-income children. The restrictions also said states covering higher-income children had to make sure individuals were without health insurance for one year before they were allowed to get government-sponsored coverage.
