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Monday July 7, 2008

 Doctors Press Senate to Undo Medicare Cuts
 

In an interview, Dr. Barrett said: “I lose money whenever I operate on a Medicare patient. In the last week, a number of doctors have told me they will quit seeing new Medicare patients or will cut back on the amount of Medicare work they do.”

The A.M.A.’s advertisements focus on Senators John Cornyn of Texas, John E. Sununu of New Hampshire and Roger Wicker of Mississippi, among others.

Republicans defend their position in various ways. Mr. Cornyn said the bill provided only “a patchwork fix.” Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa said Democrats were playing “partisan games.”

Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Republican whip, said, “Nobody wants to cut physicians’ pay.” But lawmakers disagree over how to cover the cost of remedial legislation.

More than 10 million of the 44 million Medicare beneficiaries are in private Medicare Advantage plans offered by companies like Humana, UnitedHealth and Coventry Health Care. Many of these plans offer extra benefits like vision and dental care. But independent studies have repeatedly found that the private plans cost the government more per person than traditional Medicare.

Expecting the battle to resume this week, Coventry Health Care, in an e-mail message dated July 3, asked insurance agents across the country to call Congress and oppose the pending Medicare bill, saying that it would be “harmful to beneficiaries.”

On the other side of the issue, military families have joined doctors and AARP, the advocacy group for older Americans, in lobbying for the bill.

Relatives of active-duty military personnel, military retirees and their dependents receive care under a federal program known as Tricare, which uses the Medicare fee schedule to pay doctors.

When Medicare reduces payments to doctors, fees under the military program are also reduced, and it becomes more difficult for military families to find doctors.

Congress is “playing chicken with your health care,” the Military Officers Association of America told its members in a bulletin last week.

Medicare receives 15 million claims a week for services paid under the physician fee schedule, so any change in payment rates has big implications.

Michael O. Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, said he would try to “minimize the impact” of the cut by instructing Medicare contractors to hold claims for 10 business days.

Kerry N. Weems, the acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said doctors would not be paid at the lower rates “before July 15 at the earliest.”

However, Medicare officials said, that is simply what the law requires. Under existing law, claims cannot be paid sooner than 14 days after they are received. And if claims are filed on paper, rather than electronically, they cannot be paid sooner than 29 days after they are received.

Posted by alfred at 9:06 AM - No Comments   Add a Comment  
 
 Doctors Press Senate to Undo Medicare Cuts
 

In an interview, Dr. Barrett said: “I lose money whenever I operate on a Medicare patient. In the last week, a number of doctors have told me they will quit seeing new Medicare patients or will cut back on the amount of Medicare work they do.”

The A.M.A.’s advertisements focus on Senators John Cornyn of Texas, John E. Sununu of New Hampshire and Roger Wicker of Mississippi, among others.

Republicans defend their position in various ways. Mr. Cornyn said the bill provided only “a patchwork fix.” Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa said Democrats were playing “partisan games.”

Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Republican whip, said, “Nobody wants to cut physicians’ pay.” But lawmakers disagree over how to cover the cost of remedial legislation.

More than 10 million of the 44 million Medicare beneficiaries are in private Medicare Advantage plans offered by companies like Humana, UnitedHealth and Coventry Health Care. Many of these plans offer extra benefits like vision and dental care. But independent studies have repeatedly found that the private plans cost the government more per person than traditional Medicare.

Expecting the battle to resume this week, Coventry Health Care, in an e-mail message dated July 3, asked insurance agents across the country to call Congress and oppose the pending Medicare bill, saying that it would be “harmful to beneficiaries.”

On the other side of the issue, military families have joined doctors and AARP, the advocacy group for older Americans, in lobbying for the bill.

Relatives of active-duty military personnel, military retirees and their dependents receive care under a federal program known as Tricare, which uses the Medicare fee schedule to pay doctors.

When Medicare reduces payments to doctors, fees under the military program are also reduced, and it becomes more difficult for military families to find doctors.

Congress is “playing chicken with your health care,” the Military Officers Association of America told its members in a bulletin last week.

Medicare receives 15 million claims a week for services paid under the physician fee schedule, so any change in payment rates has big implications.

Michael O. Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, said he would try to “minimize the impact” of the cut by instructing Medicare contractors to hold claims for 10 business days.

Kerry N. Weems, the acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said doctors would not be paid at the lower rates “before July 15 at the earliest.”

However, Medicare officials said, that is simply what the law requires. Under existing law, claims cannot be paid sooner than 14 days after they are received. And if claims are filed on paper, rather than electronically, they cannot be paid sooner than 29 days after they are received.

Posted by alfred at 9:05 AM - No Comments   Add a Comment  
 
Sunday July 6, 2008

 Long a Reliable Profit Source, Dividends Start to Crumble
 

Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, July 6, 2008; Page F01

Financial institutions, reeling from the rise in foreclosures and ensuing credit crunch, are making the most drastic reductions. Citigroup, which has recorded billions of dollars in losses on mortgage securities, earlier this year lopped its dividend by 41 percent. So did Wachovia. National City, a major regional bank, reduced its payout by nearly half, and Washington Mutual slashed its quarterly dividend to a mere penny.

"These guys have a long track record of not cutting dividends," said Kevin Shacknofsky, portfolio manager of the Alpine Dynamic Dividend Fund, which has 98 holdings. "The fact that they're cutting now is an indication of how tough the situation is."

So tough that 17 of 20 financial companies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index have cut their dividends so far this year, more than in the past five years combined, said Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S&P.

"Dividends are usually the last thing you want to cut," Silverblatt said. "You're not just taking your holders out, but you're telling the marketplace: 'I have a cash flow problem.' "

It's a significant blow to investors, many of whom considered dividend stocks a safe harbor in an environment of falling stock prices. Dividends, which are paid by companies on a fixed basis, provide a steady income and are an important part of the portfolios of many investors, particularly retirees on fixed incomes.

If you have shares in a company that is cutting dividends, you can either sell them and lose money now, or you can stay put and hope the dividends will recover, Boucher said. If your portfolio is too heavily invested in one area, such as financials, you might want to consider rebalancing it, but only if it makes sense for your future, not because you're spooked by the present, Boucher said. "I just think that investors are going to have to be patient," he said.

Although financial institutions have attracted much negative attention for the magnitude of their dividend cuts, they are not the only ones in trouble. Food companies, entertainment businesses and telecom firms have quietly been reducing their payouts as well.

For example, Sprint Nextel, the nation's third-largest wireless carrier, did away with its payout altogether after reporting a massive quarterly loss, in part because subscribers weren't paying their bills. La-Z-Boy, the furniture manufacturer, reduced its payout by two-thirds during an industry-wide downturn. And home builder D.R. Horton cut its dividend in half.

"As long as we are producing an operating loss, then it doesn't make sense to continue to pay the level of dividend that we were," Donald Tomnitz, chief executive of D.R. Horton, said in a conference call in May.

To be sure, numerous U.S. companies are still increasing dividends -- thanks to the four years of annual double-digit earnings growth they enjoyed before the current downturn. Last month, medical technology company Medtronic boosted its payout by 50 percent, while electronics retailer Best Buy raised its by a more modest 7.69 percent. Even a financial firm, BB&T, increased its dividend, albeit by just 2.17 percent.

If you look at dividend payouts in the past 12 months, there has been a 9.73 percent increase overall, Silverblatt said. Still, that's less than the rate the payouts rose from 2004 to 2007. Each of those years, dividend increases exceeded 11 percent, he said. Many companies are now decreasing the rate at which they increase their dividends.

"A lot of companies will raise their dividend in correlation to their earnings growth," said Don Wordell, portfolio manager of the RidgeWorth Mid-Cap Value Equity Fund, which has 80 to 100 stocks in its portfolio, all of which must pay a dividend. "You've seen some definite slowing in earnings growth, so we have seen a slowing in increase in dividends."

Analysts point out that corporate balance sheets are generally healthy. But with the economic outlook uncertain and earnings expectations dropping for the months to come, money managers are treading carefully.

Wordell, a value investor, said some financial companies are trading at "very, very attractive prices at the moment."

"But the ones we are holding off on are the ones we think are still going to have to cut dividends or raise capital," he said. "We're just not going to get in front of that. . . . Banks right now are in capital-preservation mode."

Any investor looking to make moves in this market should do a lot of research. Look at the company's earnings and outlook. Is it raising capital? Is it highly leveraged?

"Dividend investing is just like regular investing," said Shacknofsky of the Alpine Dynamic Dividend Fund. "Focus on the fundamentals. Focus on companies that are stable."

Paul Larson, equities strategist for Morningstar, said investors should determine whether the company's profit is actually covering the dividend payments. If it is not, he said, "that's definitely a yellow flag that a cut could be on the horizon."

The pattern this year has been for companies' profits to fall below the payouts for two quarters and then for the dividend to be cut, Larson said.

Dan Genter, chief investment officer of RNC Genter Capital Management, who uses a "high dividend strategy" in investing, also looks for disproportionately high dividend payout ratios compared to cash flow in a declining earnings environment.

"You're dealing with it in the financials, you're seeing it in the autos," Genter said. "All of that is really beginning to flow through the system and beginning to affect overall earnings. . . . Anytime you're in that situation where you've had a significant decrease [in earnings] and you've got a slowing macro environment on top of it, certainly dividend increases are going to go into jeopardy."

Posted by alfred at 6:23 AM - No Comments   Add a Comment  
 
Saturday July 5, 2008

 Employers Fight Tough Measures on Immigration
 

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

“We’re not hiring illegals, we’re not paying under the table,” Mr. Gilsdorf said. “But if we don’t get in under the cap and nobody is answering our ads, we don’t have employees.” His group, Colorado Employers for Immigration Reform, is pressing Congress for a much larger and more flexible guest worker program.

Unhappy California businesses won the support of Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa of Los Angeles, who wrote a letter in March to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff criticizing immigration agents for aiming raids at “established, responsible employers” in the city and urging him to focus on those with a record of labor violations.

In Virginia, an employers’ coalition headed off bills that would have closed businesses that hire illegal immigrants and would have required all employers to participate in the federal system to check the working papers of new hires, which is known as E-Verify. Business groups nationwide oppose mandatory use of the system, which is now voluntary, because they say the Social Security Administration database it draws upon is full of errors that could lead to job denials for American citizens and legal immigrants and bureaucratic overload for the agency.

Virginia employers said they learned a lesson last year after the broad immigration bill they supported failed in Congress.

“The silent masses of businesses out there should have been on the phone with their Congressional representatives calling for rational reform,” said Hobey Bauhan, president of the Virginia Poultry Federation, whose members include some of the biggest low-wage employers in the state. Virginia lawmakers ultimately adopted verification rules aimed at employers who systematically hire illegal immigrants.

In this legislative session, Arizona businesses rallied behind a bill to create what would have been the first state guest worker program in the country. Their advertising campaign used the slogan “What part of legal don’t you understand?” — a tweak of the battle cry of their opponents, who use the same phrase with the word “illegal.”

Arizona employers said they knew that passage would be difficult for the bill, because only the federal government can issue visas to immigrant workers.

Although the bill never came to a vote, employers said the debate helped make their views known in Washington.

“It’s a message to the federal government,” said Joe Sigg, director of government relations for the Arizona Farm Bureau, “that we need a legal and reliable means to recruit workers.”

Employers’ groups have not succeeded everywhere. Under a bill passed this year, Mississippi is the first state to make it a felony for an illegal immigrant to work. The measure also allows terminated employees to sue their employer if they were replaced by an illegal immigrant.

President Bush on June 9 ordered all federal contractors to check new workers with E-Verify. The administration is pressing forward with a rule that would pressure employers to fire within 90 days any worker whose identity information does not match the records of the Social Security Administration, as frequently happens with illegal immigrants. The first version of the rule was held up last year by a federal court injunction.

While many businesses have come forward, they say they speak for many others with immigrant workers that are lying low after finding that the crackdown has left them in a perilous legal bind. While raids and sanctions are increasing, employers with low-wage immigrant workers are barred by antidiscrimination rules from examining identity documents of new hires too closely or checking the immigration status of employees after they have been hired.

One employer facing this problem is the chief executive of a $20 million company on the outskirts of Los Angeles that assembles electronic parts. She said she had come to fear that her company — including its legal workers — is at risk of being crippled by an immigration raid.

The executive spoke on the condition that neither she nor her company be identified by name, for fear of attracting immigration authorities.

A human resources manager who worked for the company a decade ago hired a number of workers without conducting an extra check of their documents with the Social Security Administration, the executive said. Now she has received notices from the agency of mismatches in the identity documents of 20 workers who were hired 10 years ago, out of 90 workers on the assembly floor today.

Because of the antidiscrimination rules, the executive cannot check to be certain that the 20 workers, mainly Hispanic women, are illegal. Moreover, they have advanced through training, she said, and excel at their jobs, which require the repetitive assembly of tiny parts by hand, often under microscopes.

“I can’t replace those people,” the executive said. She said that despite offering competitive wages from $9 to $17 an hour, the company had failed over the years in repeated efforts to attract nonimmigrant workers because of the state’s tight technology labor market and because of the nature of the work, exacting and tedious. If the workers were fired or arrested, she said, she could fail to meet her contracts.

“If we have to terminate 20 people, that’s going to jeopardize 100 other jobs of people who are legal, Americans, people who are making a good living,” she said.

Angelo Paparelli, an immigration lawyer who represents the company, said: “This is not an employer who wants to turn a blind eye to lawbreaking. She is facing a tightening of the enforcement vise that does not take into account Congress’s failure to create a workable system.”

California employers were shocked by the raid earlier this year at Micro Solutions Enterprises, an established manufacturer of printer cartridges that is based in Los Angeles and has more than 800 workers. Officials said 138 workers were arrested. In a message to his customers, Avi Wazana, the Micro Solutions owner, said the company had been verifying the legal status of all new hires through federal programs for nearly a year.

Bush administration officials said the crackdown was the price employers must pay to persuade voters to agree to open the gates to immigrant workers. In an interview, Mr. Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, said, “We are not going to be able to satisfy the American people on a legal temporary worker program until they are convinced that we will have a stick as well as a carrot.”

Posted by alfred at 7:24 PM - No Comments   Add a Comment  
 
 U.S. NATIONAL DEBT CLOCK
 

The Outstanding Public Debt as of 05 Jul 2008 at 12:56:29 PM GMT is:

$ 9 , 4 7 7 , 4 5 2 , 9 8 4 , 0 6 0 . 3 7

The estimated population of the United States is 304,299,415
so each citizen's share of this debt is $31,145.16.

The National Debt has continued to increase an average of
$1.67 billion per day since September 28, 2007!
Concerned? Then tell Congress and the White House!

    Do you have any questions about the National Debt or this Debt Clock?
    Here are some answers. The Treasury Department's Bureau of Public Debt also has their own Public Debt FAQ.
National Debt -- In the News
Other sites concerned about the National Debt are:
    Also, the U.S. Department of the Treasury provides daily, monthly, and yearly figures for the Debt--to the penny! These are the figures I use to calibrate this Debt Clock.
This debt clock is maintained by Ed Hall (edhall@brillig.com). It was last calibrated using information obtained from the U.S. Department of the Treasury dated 2 July 2008. Population figures are derived from the U.S. Bureau of the Census' Population Clock.
Posted by alfred at 9:02 AM - No Comments   Add a Comment  
 
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