Across the country, states are reducing Medicaid benefits and cutting Medicaid payments to providers.

According to a recent survey, 33 states are trying to reduce Medicaid payments to providers and another 16 hope to freeze those payments.

All of this is taking place as millions are expected to become eligible for Medicaid in 2014, when the Medicaid expansion directed by the Affordable Care Act takes effect.

Read more about this situation here, in an Associated Press report published in the Chicago Tribune.…

The proliferation of hospital construction nation-wide has some Pennsylvania lawmakers contemplating reviving the state’s certificate-of-need (CON) laws.

Interest among state legislators was spurred by a series of articles in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, including a report of a new hospital in southwestern Pennsylvania that will open in mid-2012 less than a mile from an existing article.

Read about this renewed interest in CON in Pennsylvania here.…

Across the country, hospitals are building or rebuilding, spending $17 billion on construction in the past two years alone.

Is this a good idea?  Is the construction necessary or wasteful?  The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review takes a look at the issue in this article.…

More than 150,000 Pennsylvanians have been dropped from the state’s Medicaid rolls since the summer, according to the state’s Department of Public Welfare.

According to state officials, most of those who have been dropped have died, left Pennsylvania, or no longer meet the program’s eligibility requirements.

Critics of the purge blame the reductions on an understaffed bureaucracy that lacks the resources to process the paperwork that recipients have submitted to document their continued eligibility.

Learn more about the issue in this Philadelphia Inquirer article.…

While much of the Affordable Care Act is still in the process of being implemented and other parts of it are being challenged in court, at least one aspect of the 2009 health care reform law appears to be working:  the number of uninsured young adults has shrunk by 2.5 million.

Under the reform law, young adults can remain on their parents’ health insurance until they turn 26, and many appear to be taking advantage of this opportunity.

Read about the apparent success of one aspect of the Affordable Care Act that enjoyed wide bipartisan support in this Associated Press report.…