Get Your Blog Up

“This administration is populated by people who’ve spent their careers bashing government. They’re not just small-government conservatives—they’re Grover Norquist, strangle-it-in-the-bathtub conservatives. It’s a cognitive disconnect for them to be able to do something well in an arena that they have so derided and reviled all these years.”

Senator Hillary Clinton

Wednesday, September 29, 2004

Bush breaks the law

And I'm not talking about his DUI, either:
The Bush administration violated the law by allowing private insurers to limit choices of some patients in a small trial program of managed health care under Medicare, congressional investigators said.

Preferred provider organizations, which offer members a network of discounted health care providers, have enrolled 105,000 Medicare beneficiaries in 19 states.

In some cases, insurers refused to pay claims for home health visits, nursing care, dental work, routine physicals and other services obtained from providers who were not part of the PPO network, the Government Accountability Office said.

"By law, these plans should have been required to cover all services in their benefit packages even if those services were obtained from providers outside the plans' provider networks," GAO said.

The administration was wrong to waive the requirement, GAO said.

Link