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Pulling back the curtains on wage-theft enforcement in MN; Trump's latest attack is on RFK, Jr; NM LGBTQ+ equality group endorses 2024 'Rock Star' candidates; Michigan's youth justice reforms: Expanded diversion, no fees.

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Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says rebuilding Baltimore's Key Bridge will be challenging and expensive. An Alabama Democrat flips a state legislature seat and former Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman dies at 82.

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Historic wildfires could create housing and health issues for rural Texans, a Kentucky program helps prison parolees start a new life, and descendants of Nicodemus, Kansas celebrate the Black settlers who journeyed across the 1870s plains seeking self-governance.

Former Medicaid Boss: Health Care Reform is Just What the Dr. Ordered

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Thursday, December 31, 2009   

HARTFORD, Conn. - At its most basic level, health care reform has to do two things: Get nearly everyone into the system and reduce overall costs. According to former national Medicaid director Sally Richardson, those are really the same thing.

Richardson, now the executive director of the West Virginia University Institute for Health Policy Research, also was a member of the Clinton administration health care task force. She says the key to reaching both goals is getting people to move away from crisis medicine and toward prevention, and she sees those goals being achieved in the health care reform bills from the U.S. House and Senate.

"It's about prevention and wellness, so that your first encounter is not when you have pneumonia; your first encounter is to go to a Community Health Center when you've got a really bad cold that's getting worse."

What is known as the public option - public insurance for people not covered by other plans - has been replaced in the Senate version with unspecified nonprofit group plans administered by the federal Office of Personnel. Richardson says judging from what federal employees have now, a nonprofit option should work to provide reasonably-priced, no frills insurance.

"It would be standard health care coverage, like a good Blue Cross-BlueShield plan."

Congressional Budget Office data shows that the Senate version would expand health care coverage for more than 200,000 people in Connecticut. Key Republicans have attacked the bill as an expensive, big government take-over without adequate cost controls, even as the Congressional Budget Office has found the bill would actually lower the federal deficit.




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