This & that.....
Former White House ethics chief Walter Shaub ripped President Trump as a "wannabe autocrat" for sharing an image "depicting CNN's blood on the sole of his shoe," adding that Trump's "colicky tweets" show that he's "hurting this weekend."
link.
"Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?” — Matthew 7:9
Governor Brownback, a man who considers himself someone of significant faith, working to transition to the position of Ambassador to Religious Freedom, may need to learn a few things from the book he professes. The Kansas City Star revealed that the policy in Kansas has left many families struggling to figure out care for their loved ones.
Administrators at Villa St. Francis nursing home in Olathe have a checklist of questions before taking in a new resident with a pending Medicaid application.How many Medicaid-pending residents are we already subsidizing? Is this person likely to survive the months it will probably take for the state of Kansas to approve their application? If not, is there a loved one who is willing to follow through on the application after this person dies?
The situation in Kansas has hit a point where the state seems to be creating a policy of stiffing medical facilities rather than pay on benefits, putting care providers in a difficult position.
Morgan Bell, a social worker at Stormont Vail Hospital in Topeka, told a KanCare legislative oversight committee last month that she was recently looking for a nursing home for a patient who had fallen into a coma.“It came to my attention that even the couple of facilities that would make exceptions for KanCare-pending applicants are not able to take these patients if they have a limited life expectancy, solely because they will not receive payment if the patient dies before the application is approved,” Bell said.
Kansas has been concerned about this problem for some time, but the concern hasn’t been enough to correct it.
In 2016, the Kansas Health Institute published this look at the situation:
The Medicaid application backlog in Kansas is on its way back up, threatening months of progress on a coverage problem that has vexed health care providers across the state.For more than a year, providers that rely on Kansas Medicaid, or KanCare, have been stung by delayed payments as they wait months for eligibility determinations that by federal rule are supposed to take no more than 45 days.
Today, more than a thousand Kansans sit, waiting, unsure of end of life or extended placement because of a system clearly in violation of federal rules. There is little risk to Kansas, though, as most observers believe the Trump administration has little interest in forcing compliance with these regulations or invoking any penalties.
Facing problems handling the basic services required, the Brownback administration rolled out Kancare 2.0 for approval this month, and some of the new items are doozies.
The biggest departures from the past five years are the implementation of work requirements for parents with children ages six and older, as well as a three-year lifetime limit on Medicaid coverage.About 12,000 parents would be affected by these changes, of Kansas' 420,000 Medicaid enrollees."One of my concerns is if that's where we're starting, where are we going to end up?" Weisgrau said.Per the proposal, a single parent would have to work, participate in job training or community service for a minimum of 20 to 30 hours, and two-parent households would be required to work between 35 and 55 hours. Parents that fail to meet these requirements may become ineligible for coverage until they gain employment.
With a system already boxing out residents, slow to approve applications, and leaving some out in the cold due to delayed payments, the reboot of KanCare is even more punishing; extending to other areas, including work requirements.
This Christmas in Kansas, the elderly wait for placement that may not happen, and the younger who rely on the privatized program may find that they are about to get boxed out.
Nothing says compassion like a system that harms so many.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/12/22/1726888/-Intolerable-cruelty-Kansas-Medicaid-leaves-elderly-to-die-without-care
SCOTT PRUITT:
With 30 bodyguards in his personal army, a custom-built sound proof booth in his office, two new security systems on his door, and an entire floor blocked off from the rest of the EPA, Scott Pruitt really doesn't want Americans to know what he's doing.
He's refusing to regulate even those chemicals that were specifically called out in the Toxic Substances Control Act.
He decimated the rules for dealing with the most polluted, most dangerous SuperFund sites and refuses to provide any justification for the change.
Scott Pruitt is totally out of control. He's refusing to protect the public, destroying any hint of transparency, and spending millions on his paranoid empire of fear.
Sign the petition to Congress: Scott Pruitt has to answer to the public, and to them.
Sign the petition: Stop Trump EPA Secretary Scott Pruitt's Wild Ride
This morning, the President of the United States rose from his eight hours of sleep to begin his other eight hours a day – of cable television, that is.
The President began his daily binge with the usual four hours of FOX and Friends – and their coverage inspired him to double down on his attacks against the FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who announced he would be retiring yesterday.
McCabe’s decision to step down prompted the President to immediately swing into attack gear as the Republican propaganda machine took aim at fired FBI Director James Comey’s number two, pre-emptively working to discredit him in the eyes of the public before he has a chance to publicly affirm Comey’s assertion that President Trump attempted to obstruct the Justice Department’s investigation into disgraced National Security Advisor Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn’s secret communications with Russian and Turkish agents.
Of course, the unimaginative right-wing media engine is trotting out the same old boogeyman in order to rile up their base – or rather, the boogeywoman.
.@FoxNews-FBI’s Andrew McCabe, “in addition to his wife getting all of this money from M (Clinton Puppet), he was using, allegedly, his FBI Official Email Account to promote her campaign. You obviously cannot do this. These were the people who were investigating Hillary Clinton.”
Never mind the outrageous hypocrisy of Trump using his Official Twitter Account to attack the people who were investigating Donald Trump – hypocrisy has been drowned in the swamp and no longer has meaning or weight in the era of Trump.
Trump’s entire premise is based on the implication that having a political affiliation or expressing an opinion of any sort is immediate proof of bias and thus should be disqualified from their jobs – which of course doesn’t apply to him or his administration.
What is clear at this point is that the more noise Trump makes about Andrew McCabe, the quicker his name will rise on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s list of people to be interviewed – and all the tweets in the world aren’t going to stop a man like McCabe from telling his side of the story.
Trump’s guilt becomes more and more evident with every letter he types./washingtonpress.com
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